VAXen

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.

Garden Addenda

Updates to earlier posts: the Aaron's Rod, the fox, and the thing in the garden.

I'm Not A Foxglove

Two years ago I wrote about an unusual "foxglove" in the garden. It turned out to be Greater Mullein or Aaron's Rod. I have no idea where it came from. Steve Reed had one around the same time. Ours produced clouds of seeds but none grew last year. This year, we have three, two with multiple forks. I spotted two early on in the vegetable patch and moved then to where the foxgloves grow: I recognised them by their furry leaves (Beethoven's well-known piano piece) but the third hid and has grown next to the runner beans. They are now mostly in seed again.

Foxy Is Injured 

The fox that has been visiting the garden since Winter has an injured leg. We put hedgehog biscuits out, but as the fox did not appear for five nights we feared the worst. On the fifth night, magpies found the biscuits early in the morning, so we stopped putting them out. We are not feeding magpies. Of course, the fox reappeared the very next night, still nursing its paw, but not so badly. We put food out again in a 'magpie-proof' pot, but they still got it. If Foxy had come in the night he would have got it first. He has not been for three nights now.

Pumpkin? Gourd? Giant Puffball?

Thank you for the entertaining comments. The Mischief who put it there will be pleased, too. "What is THAT?" was exactly my reaction when I first saw it. Was it a paper bag, a partly deflated balloon, a beach ball, or had it grown there? I really did not want to touch it. Eventually, I plucked up the courage to poke it with the edge of a trowell and it rang out a clear C#. Ceramic.