On 07/16/2016 15:21, ste...@malikoff.com wrote: > > In the mid 80s our Uni teaching 11/780 running VMS would groan and creak > under the strain of 50 students logged on. I was told that over at Sydney > Uni, their 11/780s were running a very modded and tweaked Unix and could > have a hundred or more students logged in on the one machine. Whether it > was crashy or not, they got more bang-for-buck out of their VAXen.
That's a tough example to generalize without knowing more about the workloads involved. I've certainly heard many anecdotes where a given model running VMS supported many more users than the same hardware running Ultrix/4BSD, *and* vice versa. But these examples can easily turn out to be skewed - having a ton of users running ALL-IN-1, MAIL, or NOTES-11 doesn't compare well to users compiling code, running SAS or SPSS, or doing database work. Substitute rn/trn, Mail, cc/f77, ingres, etc as needed. ;) --S.