That Tektronix machine, in the center left, brown with the green screen, is very similar to the one I worked with in college, it may well be the same thing.
At work, our VAX-11/730 was a 3 cabinet affair. The first cabinet (similar in size to the thing the Tektronix is sitting on, but that’s certainly not a VAX), was the computer itself. It had a removable 5MB disk pack on top, an internal 80MB hard drive, and a small streaming cassette drive (not your normal audio cassettes, these are the small ones with the little wheel in them). That was used to load software on to the system. I don’t recall how much memory we had, 2 or 3MB (or words, I just don’t remember how the VAX calculated memory).
The next cabinet was simply a 6250 reel to reel tape drive. It was nice as it used a vacuum system to thread the tape on to the take up reel. We used this device everyday. Every night, we’d stream our main database to the tape, then read it back in to merge the days transactions. We did this simply because we didn’t have the extra space on the 80MB main drive.
This was remedied by the addition of the 3rd cabinet, which contained a Fujitisu Eagle 400MB drive. This was a mainstay of the industry at the time, and cost us $25,000.
Four HUNDRED megabytes. You can just smell the freedom!
We had a room full of terminals connected to this machine, two printers, and we had easily 7 people a day working on this thing doing development, data entry, data processing and reports. Our hammer was Datatrieve, and, later BASIC PLUS.
Sometimes we had more. We tended to use the terminals to run long running jobs.
We had a lady at the front who ran much of our reports, we adding a faux crank to her terminal for her to spin to make the system go faster.
And I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s important for context, as the quote said, the 730 was their slowest VAX. This was a tiny machine. The 11/780 (two steps larger than the 730) is where MIPS was coined, this thing probably ran 300K instructions per second.
But it worked, I was there 4 years, mid-80s, and it was there still churning along when I left and lasted several more years. Over time it was supplemented by a MicroVAX, and random Unix workstations (Suns and the like). Those were mostly demonstration projects, and the MicroVAX was used only by one or two engineers for some specific processing, not the day to day stuff that we were doing with Datatrieve.