New Month Old Post: First posted 15th April, 2018
VAXen. It’s the plural of VAX. It used to say so in the DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) computer manuals in the nineteen-eighties. VAX computers could be run as clusters of VAXen. Most universities had them.
A DEC 'dumb terminal' |
So I was delighted to see some of these iconic machines again in Jim Austin’s Computer Collection
at Fimber near Fridaythorpe in the East Riding. By “again” I really
mean for the first time. Hardly anyone got near them in the
nineteen-eighties. The privileged might be allowed to look through the
glass of their air-conditioned rooms, but ‘users’ were never allowed in.
Their only contact with the computers was through remote ‘dumb
terminals’. At Fimber you can touch the machines and even open their
cabinets and take the boards out. Of course, they are not switched on
now.
He even has the first computer I used, the Elliott 903, not just any Elliott 903 but the very same one from the psychology department at Hull University. You really had to keep your fingers out of the way when the punched paper tape was flying through. What a sorry state it is in now. For a moment I imagined myself volunteering and getting it working again.
The Elliott 903 from Hull University, a punched paper tape computer |
I returned home fizzing with enthusiasm, thinking of the blog posts I could write. My wife was not impressed.
“Great! A barn full of old grey metal cabinets. Fascinating!”
“Well, some of them are black. And you can open the doors and look inside.”
I babbled on excitedly about all the machines I had known so well: the Elliott 903, IBMs, ICLs, PDP-8s and PDP-11s, SWTPC minis, LSI-11s, Sun microsystems, Silicon Graphics, VAXen …
"Vaxen!" My wife ran out of patience.
“Did they come in boxen? Ordered by Faxen? Is our fridge Electroluxen? Cooling the milk for your Weetabixen? Vaxen makes them sound like little animals, or the name of one of Santa’s reindeers.”
“Reindeer(s?)”
Now, there’s another plural to conjure with.