On Thu, Apr 15, 1999 at 10:52:15PM -0400, Allison J Parent wrote:
> <Yeah but code density and data-alignment-wise, 2GB of RAM on an Alpha is
> <probably equivalent to 512MB on a VAX.  Hell, on a VAX we can manipulate
> <data in the form of bitstrings which don't even have to be located on byte
> <boundaries... just pick it up in the middle of a byte somewhere.
> 
> Going back to vaxen without enough memory to be useful...
> 
> In them olden days we supported dozens of users with sometimes as little as 
> 8mb.  But then we were saddles with this really neat Os called VMS that was 
> written and tuned to VAXen.  What was really wild was the DECwindows 
> windowing system running on those old slow MVIIs with bunches of other users 
> doing same.

Uhm....

We (Astronomical Dept. at Bonn University) had a VAX 11/780. An early
VAX 11/780, I've been told, so early that its memory controller could NOT
handle more than 4 MB of RAM. While we could have afforded 3rd-party 
memory add-ons, we could not afford a 2nd memory controller.

Rwo evenings a week was AIPS evening... the evening the people using the AIPS
image processing system were _allowed_ to run it.

I used a different system called GIPSY for data reduction. My real jobs needed
about 12 hours to run, and I had to start them early in the evening, else 
I would have been killed the next morning after morning coffee (when the big
bunch of users  -- the ones not being Diploma students -- started to use the
system).

"Back in the old days, we had just 0 and 1, and the 0 were scarce, so we had
 a recycling bin below the card puncher and 2 students who would glue the 
 paper snippets back into used punched cards."

Regards,
	Ignatios