"price of vax 730 with vms" - the 11/730 from DEC

Hardware
1

For some reason I searched for “price of vax 730 with vms” and found a 1982 version of DEC’s business plan for the 11/730.

What do I learn… that the codename is NEBULA, that it’s a low-end model to try to keep that part of the market, it’s to be a quarter the price and a quarter the performance of a grown-up VAX (11/780), it’s to be priced at $28000 and up (with the VMS license) and it’s to be 100% compatible with a big VAX and contain emphatically no custom technology - all off the shelf.

(And it’s got an Intel 8085 to drive the front panel.)

We learn more (much more) at gunkies:
VAX-11/730 - Computer History Wiki

2 Likes
2

Any idea when the PC became as poweful as a VAX?
Now days I see a used micro-vax ??? on ebay about $400 to $600, no HD or software.

3

A quick google search turns up a usenet post opining

in round number, a 33Mz 386 is 4 times faster then an 11/780

Edit: see also Roy Longbottom’s Whetstone results

4

Some fun MWIPS results from http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/whetstone.htm:

BBC B    (6502) ... 0.0031
Apple II (6502) ... 0.0011
Apple II (6502) ... 0.0027
ZX81     (Z80A) ... 0.00052
Spectrum (Z80A) ... 0.00052

These are all BASIC tests, the Apple II apparently running two versions of BASIC. (I guess, these tests reflect more the efficiency of the BASIC interpreter than the hardware, compare the Sinclair results.)
And a maybe interesting comparison to the PDP-8 (running FORTRAN tests), where we find the BBC B and the Apple II (with its better result) roughly in the same category as the PDP-8i:

PDP 8I     (P7) ... 0.0029
PDP 8E EAE (P7) ... 0.0051
1 Like
5

It’s a shame that the old source code to produce these results isn’t around. Apart from the original Algol source and the later Fortran-77, the source archive jumps straight to QBasic.

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For the Apple II, the lowest score is for interpreted BASIC; presumably the other is compiled BASIC… maybe this?