--- Eric Dittman <dittman_at_dittman.net> wrote:
> > How many VAX-11/78x machines were produced?
> > These days you expect that thousands of any machine would
> > be sold (except maybe the specialised supercomputers).
> > I believe that for the VAX 9000 series, only 400-500 made
> > it out of the door. The same order of magnitude may well
> > be true for the VAX-11/78x systems.
>
> You can't base the VAX-11/78x system sales projections on the
> VAX 9000 sales. The VAX-11/78x systems were very reliable and
> worked well. The VAX 9000 systems weren't and didn't.
Back in the day when they used to still compare Mainframe sales to Minis
(c. 1984), I remember seeing a number - $300,000,000. It was the amount
sold of a particular class of IBM mainframe and nearly the identical
amount sold of VAX-11/780s. The dollar figures were remarkably close,
especially when it was further evident that it was approximately 100
of the Mainframes and 1,000 of the VAX-11/780s. Those numbers were
probably the peak in annual sales of specifically the 11/780, but it
is a ballpark - I'd estimate the total sales between 2K and 5K, not
including 11/785s. They probably didn't sell as many of those, since
most customers did not require dual processors and SMP didn't emerge
until 1988 with VMS 5.0, long after the 11/780 was being sold as new.
I did see osu-eddie, an 11/780 running some flavor of BSD, once the
machine through which all Columbus UUCP traffic flowed, at the university
surplus. This was more than 10 years ago, and I think it went for $200.
A local reseller bought it, stripped it and I saw the carcass in the
dumpster the next month. :-( That was the last 11/780 I saw in the wild.
-ethan
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Received on Wed Jul 25 2001 - 23:02:34 BST