At 13:53 6/5/2002, Brian Chase wrote:
>On Wed, 5 Jun 2002, Chris Wareham wrote:
> > Akos Varga wrote:
>   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 cannot make out the rest of the text in cyrillian, but the start of it 
("CBAKC") is "CVAX" (translated by letter to letter as "S V A K S"), so the 
whole sentence goes something like "CVAX - when you care enough to steal 
the very best"...

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

As far as I know, they never cloned the CVAX (not even the Microvax II 
CPU), they just bought (and smuggled) them in high quantities, so I guess 
this message never got to the people addressed :)

About "exotic" VAXen: I don't know that much about other Eastern Bloc 
countries, but I think the last VAX cloned in teh "classic manner" was the 
11/730. The hungarian VAXen were clones of the 11/780, the 11/730 and the 
11/780-turned-into-11/785. The rest were Microvax II and III systems built 
around the original CPU, with hungarian memory cards, printer and serial 
ports, Emulex disk and tape controllers, etc. Of course there were some 
modified systems like a 4-processor system built around the 11/730, or 
2-way 11/780's and 11/785's, and even one big 4-way system involving two 
two-CPU 11/785 (=11/787?) systems sharing memory through an original 
Digital shared-memory box.
On the other hand I've heard about a yugoslawian or east-german 11/750 
clone, but I never saw it.

         Hamster