On Wed, 5 Jun 2002, Chris Wareham wrote:
> Akos Varga wrote:

> > ... and all hungarian VAX clones had SMD disks, as no RA or RM disks
> > were allowed to be sold here (Hungary - at the time way behind the "Iron
> > Curtain"). Although most of the times this meant some Emulex, or cloned
> > Emulex controller (SC21,31,41) hanging off the Unibus and not the SBI...

> Are many of these clones still in use? ...

Certainly at least as hobbyist machines.  There are some nice pics here
on Ákos Varga's pages:

  http://telnet.hu/hamster/tpa/e_index.html

> ... I remember reading about them
> in some DEC marketing blurb (something about "if you're going to copy,
> then copy the best"). Owning a cold war Vax clone would be about the
> geekiest thing imaginable ...

I'm not sure if it was ever used as marketing blurb.  There is the
infamous instance of DEC inscribing `VAX - when you care enough to steal
the very best' on the CVAX chip die in Cyrillic:

  http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html

I suppose this could be considered a form of marketing to the Soviet
computer engineers involved with reverse-engineering the VAX.

-brian.