It's not just a matter of size, but also of maintenance. Tony says, I have the docs, I can maintain it - but do you want to chase down a logic defect among a gazillion small- and medium-scale integration ICs? And the bus connections? And the wire wrap? And the microcode? (I have done this.)
After restoring the VAX-11/780-5 at the Living Computer Museum and running it for some time, we moved it to a new home. It took several days to get it running again, reseating board, ensuring that power connections were tight and secure - dealing with a creaky old machine that was, in truth, once a creaky new machine. Don't get me wrong, I would love to have a VAX-11/780 to be a 'bookend' system next to my VAX 6000-660. I would love to win the lottery so I could afford the space, the power, and the time. But after I fantasize a bit about that, I go fire up a VAXstation, or my VAX 4000/300, or the SIMH session I have running on OpenBSD on a G4 iBook (because I can). Yes, start off small, and if the bug bites you, swing for the fences! IMHO, YMMV, MOUSE -- Ian On Thu, Jul 2, 2015 at 12:17 AM, devin davison <lyokob...@gmail.com> wrote: > Ive got a large sgi altix 350 machine running here almost 24/7, uses quite > a bit of power. Rivals the 2 air conditioners on power consumption. Power > is not an issue, if i do get something bigger then ill just run the altix > less and power up the vax. New house has an air conditioned office in the > garage, now would be the best time to get something big i think, but if it > is not close it will have to be shipped which would be costly. Maybe ill > start off small... > -- Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate The Information School <http://ischool.uw.edu> Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal <http://tribunalvoices.org> Value Sensitive Design Research Lab <http://vsdesign.org> University of Washington There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China."