On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 2:35 PM Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
The first single-chip VLSI implementation of the VAX architecture (the 78032, used in the MicroVAX-II and others)
And it was sloooow by comparison to its contemporary VAXen. Its primary benefits were board space, component cost and power savings, at the expense of a fair amount of speed.
The 78032? Oh heck yes it was slower than the "big boys". But it got an entire VAX processor, with FPU and 1MB of RAM, on a single board for a fraction of the price of any of the "big boys". It enabled the deskside and desktop VAXen, etc. Remember, there's more to life than just speed! ;)
Packing a full VAX into a box the size of suitcase for ~$20,000 was an amazing feat in 1985. We were definitely on the small end of DEC's customers then - we ordered an 11/750 the week they were announced (S/N BT0000354) because the price point was enough below the 11/780 that we could manage it. We also got one of the early 11/730s because, again, the low price point made it affordable for a second VAX in the company. Similarly for the uVAX-I, more because we needed a Qbus VAX for our new Qbus product, but right after we bought a second one (for code development), the uVAX-II came out and we paid the full upgrade price ($17K?) to replace the CPU, disk controller, disk and RAM (and software license!) Totally worth the cost for our needs - we now had a machine that was the fastest number cruncher in the building, and for 1-3 users, it was way faster then our 11/750, for 20% the cost! Yes, the uVAX-II was slower than the full-sized lineup of the day, but at a hell of a price-performance point. I have a bare CVAX die in an acrylic block I got at DECUS - "Without Ultrix, it's just a paperweight!" But outside of the DEC world, nobody really noticed. -ethan