> 
> > When I had access to the VAX room (mind you, not VAX SERVER room, in those
> > days they had one big fax and a couple dozen terminals) of the Univ. Bonn
> > Physics Dept., some big 36bit DEC was still round. Use up about 10 times
> > wall space from what the 11/780 needed.
> 
> This is drifting way off the tech-kern topic, so one well-placed flame
> will shut me up, *but*...  The 11/780 may have taken up a tenth the
> wall space, but it also did a tenth as much...  Less than that.  IIRC,
> the DECsystem 20 was a 5 mips machine.  The one at WPI was easily
> capable of handling 50 users doing compiles and running emacs, as long
> as one of us (me) wasn't rebuilding the C compiler.  A VAX 11/780
> couldn't possibly take that load.

Hell, a PDP-11/70 could handle 64 users (I saw this at Tektronix) while a Vax
11/780 went to it's knees 3/4 of that.

A Decsystem 20 was a fine machine (we had two at the parent company of Nike
where I got my start in this biz), except for the 36 bit wordsize.