DEC (digital) VAX / VAXstation 4000 VLC Hardware and VMS / OpenVMS DECwindows Motif GUI [EN]
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 มิ.ย. 2024
- Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:34 General Talk
1:43 Outside
2:31 Inside
5:08 Display, Keyboard, Mouse and Graphics Tablet
9:08 Hardware Configuration
10:29 Booting
14:26 DECwindows Motif - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Oh wow! Memories come back! I used to repair those VAXes professionally. Microvax-II, VAX4000/6000, Alphaserver 8000, Alphaserver ES45.... we still have some machines in our spare parts stock 🙂Thanks for showing this! 👍
Thank you :) But I really like your videos as well. Just watched one of your videos about an IBM mainframe a few days ago. It is getting harder to get spare parts or maschines these days. I'm glad, that I brought my VAX 4000/300 back to life :)
@@DECcomputers I have a working VAX4000/705 in my workshop... Using it to test old tape drives.
@PlaywithJunk That is a nice NVAX mashine, faster than all my VAXes together :) I hope I'll find second VAX 4000/300 (or above) some day to restore a bit of the original cluster configuration
1:12 - One thing you need to keep in mind is almost no-one ever paid the full price for those (or any other) workstations - all major workstation vendors had discounts in the two-figure percentages for scientific institutions, universities, and basically all different kinds of industries going on at almost all times.
Same today... The Dell servers I got a few days ago were 230'000$ per piece according to the online shop. But I know the customer paid about 70'000$
I found some upgrade options as well, but the discounts are not listed in the offical price lists, so I could only guess them ;)
Great to see old VAX hardware running - THANKS!
We used to have VAX, Alpha and Itanium OpenVMS machines in the office. Now we use emulation software.
Übrigens perfekt zu diesem Computer verbinden können moderne optische Maus.Die Tatsache, dass ältere Versionen optische Mäuse hatten optischen Chip zu steckvorrichtungen durch подпайки Draht-Bus-Mäuse, die in diesen Jahren wurden auf den Plattformen Amiga und andere.Dort gehen die Leiter auf dem X-und Y-Knöpfe und Draht-Maus.Pin-Belegungen gibt es im Internet.
Wow, I haven't seen a DEC puck mouse in ages.
I keep thinking of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: "He chose... Hawley"
later puck mice had balls before they switched over to rectangles. I didn't mind the hawley mice myself, provided the desk surface was sufficiently grippy. they were easier to clean than balled mice, and the 1024x864 interfaces on the decstations I used these with didn't need the finest pointer resolution to be useful.
I love my VLC. Actually I love all my VAXen. Looking forward to more videos from you.
Thank you very much for this awesome informative and insightful video! Subscription!
Keep up the amazing work! I'm all ears (and eyes, too;) )
Thanks for that. I don't think I ever used a VLC. Mostly 60's and 90's. As to the size, certainly it was the thinnest VAXstation, but probably a toss up between that and the 2000 as to which one is the smallest. Some interesting topics there 😉
Thank you :) But I really enjoy your videos too and learned a lot from them. I linked them under some of my videos for further information (especially on VAXcluster content). I even stole some of your sentences "Welcome back to another episode" and "hope you find that interesting" ;) From its volume, the VLC is smaller, it has about 8658 cubic centimetere, the VAXstation 2000 has 12064 cubic centimeter and it is quite heavy as well, for a small VAX.
Cool video. You just earned a subsciber.
Beauty
This era of computing is fascinating! I've been enjoying your videos. I had timesharing accounts on VAX/VMS systems when I was in college, but I never had a chance to use any of the VAX workstations. Have you ever experimented with Ultrix or BSD on VAX hardware? I know that the VAX was hugely important in Unix history.
Thank you very much. You are right, I really like these machines, even if they are from a time before I was born. I have some Ultrix tapes, but I haven't tried them out, partly because they are quite fragile due to their age. But some day I'll try to install Ultrix on one of my maschines, as well as NetBSD.
@@DECcomputers I'd love to see NetBSD on one of these machines. BTW, I enjoyed your humorous response to the less-than-polite comment you got on your last video 🙂
@davehohacks It's a good idea to do videos on Unix on VAX, I'm thinking of trying Ultrix and NetBSD. I also found an image of Ultrix 4.5, so I don't have to use my tapes. Unfortunately the prices for 50-pin SCSI went crazy, but I've ordered BlueSCSI as an media to install these OS on. Thanks :) I thought I have to make a small comment on that topic, but the beginning of the video was already recorded, therefore I placed it at the end :)
7:44 i have a spare one of this mouse and kept it for i considered it rare enough
I just discovered DEC through this video, first time hearing of their computers and OS. Though I'm a bit confused as to why they even existed in the first place, i don't see their OS or machines having much utility over Mac and Windows machines of the same era.
a lot of the infrastructure is honestly fascinating! i mean with history itself DEC was very prominent in the computer space before with the PDP-11 being the most popular minicomputer (read mini as big as a closet as compared to a room).
Then with the computers themselves what i find most fascinating is the clustering of workstations. You'd say buy 4 devices for your 10 worker office (since a lot of office work is intermittent demand) and they would be able to pool resources between them and share the workload! This also makes two other common problems very easy, if you want to get more power you can actually just simply get another device and connect it to the cluster and for the other if a device fails your system can still be operational in a degraded state.
The target group was a different one. VMS was also not known for its GUI, but as a server or time sharing OS; workstations were only a secondary area. As the previous comment described, VAX systems were so-called "minicomputers", but they were not really "mini". Even my two larger machines (VAX 4000/300 and 200), from which the machine in the video boots, are still smaller ones. The first VAX - VAX 11/780 - came onto the market in 1978 as the successor to the PDP11, the first VAXstation - VAXstation 100 - in 1983; the end was in the mid-90s. In the meantime, DEC was the second largest computer manufacturer in the world. Interestingly, the emergence of low-cost x86 servers and workstations as well as Windows NT 4 may have contributed to the end of DEC.
Well… The 32-bit DEC VAX came out in 1977, many years before Mac or Windows so one might ask why Mac or Windows existed when they can’t do anything that the VAX couldn’t do.
The VLC is a neat machine. Would be even better if it could take a bit more memory. :) Modern NetBSD still works on them but a bit slow nowadays. AFAIK Ultrix does not work on the VLC (or any of the 4000-series vaxstations).
That's right, I forgot the limitiations on Ultrix, I've read about it a long time ago. I'm planning some videos about Unix on VAX, but for Ultrix I need another VAXstation, but I'll start with NetBSD, that is running on the VLC :)
I wonder how modern of a web browser could be run remotely with display on the VLC? I remember running NCSA mosaic on X terminals and decstations and later from a sparccenter 2000 to my own local Linux system running X.... per-application remote displays displaced with virtual video outputs (remote desktop) and slinging rendered pixels instead of drawing instructions (wayland vs X or display postscript) seem like a step backwards but I don't think I truly grok the amount of bandwidth available to current systems...
I know that Netscape is running on that machine. I saw it in a video from @devnull th-cam.com/video/46ixMmmlgvY/w-d-xo.html but it's not really a modern web browser.
VLC stands for Verx Low Cost. It was the cheapest VAXstation in those days.
Is that the official meaning? I couldn't find anything about that in offical documents.
can it run crysis?
No, but it can run NetBSD! 😎
mreow