Comment by Suzuran
11 hours ago
It looks entirely made up because the procedure described is also entirely alien to me, and I had professional experience with both VMS and Ultrix when they were still supported by DEC. (And it's certainly not BSD...)
11 hours ago
It looks entirely made up because the procedure described is also entirely alien to me, and I had professional experience with both VMS and Ultrix when they were still supported by DEC. (And it's certainly not BSD...)
I know I just made it up! I have an 11/23+ and I'm guessing I was thinking of that 3!
Could be. You could also have been thinking of the 11/730, which was a cost-reduced 11/750 and thus the second-slowest VAX model DEC ever sold.
The slowest would be the 11/725, which was a cost-reduced 11/730 that had a reduced clock speed and half of the bus slots filled with epoxy to limit expansion. The 11/725 was so slow that using it was an act of masochism; It was slower than your 11/23+.
Those models were pretty rare though. Even though they were cheaper than an 11/750 the performance drop from the 750 to the 730 was too severe to justify even the reduced cost. If that were all then maybe replacing PDP-11s being used in industrial applications might have saved it but the 730 was still too expensive versus the existing PDP-11 products, and the 725's limited expansion made it less attractive than those same PDP-11 products. The PDP-11 thus outlived both the 725 and the 730.