How were VAX/VMS systems deployed during their heyday in the 1980's?

[czunit]

UMBC had two Vax 8600's in 1986: UMBC1 and UMBC2. They were connected to well over 100 terminals via Gandalf serial thingies and of course a modem bank. There was also UMBC5 which was a 785 running Ultrix on this thing called the ArpaNET. 1 and 2 were on Bitnet.

They were connected via DECNet and modems to TOWVAX, LOYVAX, and others (Towson State, Loyola University). Oh the fun we had with DCL and batch queues... I also had my pdp11/23 connected into this from home with DDCMP over a modem, RSX11M 4.0, and Decnet/4.0. Slow, but it allowed me to write my class programs on the 23+ and communicate with the VAXes using Phase 3 routing. Compile times on the 23+ were often faster than the 8600's when they were loaded with people.

Good times.

 

[Gusking]

Actually COBOL, or was it DIBOL?

I am not sure of DaveP, but we certainly had COBOL, along with Fortran, Pascal and C, on our main cluster which had, I think, seven nodes, originally VAX 8600's. Later on (1995?) they added some Alphas (64-bit machines) and then by the time DEC became Compaq and then HP bought Compaq, the cluster had some of the big Alphas-AXP servers. We had manufacturing sites in the US, Italy, Japan, Korea and Malaysia, and sales offices in several other countries all connected to the cluster.

I was in systems engineering and worked mainly on process control and data collection systems. We used micro-Vaxen, mostly 3100-30's, in production and Alpha servers for design. I retired in 2012 and was given a couple VAX 3100's from their scrap heap and a couple DEC 3000-300 Alpha servers. They still run.

 

[RedSonja]

NY Institute of Technology ran Vax 11/780s as their undergrad servers in the 80's. They had a heavy concentration of graphics terminals in the lab but nobody was really using them for that.
The USAF also used Vax for NATO-cooperative intelligence message handling systems. Very funny story: a Vax was getting installed in a SCIF at Ramstein Airbase/HQ USAFE for NATO and the people who apparently were in charge of it were Belgian. They called up DEC tech support the day after it was installed and said in a heavy accent: "There is smoke and a very bad smell." It seems one of the operators had been eating cereal in the machine room - Apple Jacks - and a piece fell into the system and started burning. Forever after that system was known as the "Cinnamon Toasty Apple Vax".