The long life of VAX (and microVAX)

Histories
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It struck me while musing that the VAX had a really rather long life. The first VAX I met would have been at Uni: there was a presumably big VAX in the Computer Science department running VMS, and a possibly smaller one in EE running a Unix. There were also some in-house 68k workstations in CS.

Then, in my first job, there was a VAXcluster of some sort, IIRC.

In my second job, there was I think a microVAX although mostly we used Apollo workstations, and a few (68k) Macs for documentation. Oh, and I think a (68k) Sun 3 in a corner somewhere.

In my third job, there were a pair big of VAXes and at least four, maybe six, microVAXes. Mostly we worked on transputer systems, with VMS for storage and for email. Later we got Sparc workstations, and then Sparc took over the server side too.

So I think that’s VAXes from about 1984 to about 1993 or so.

Anyone else? Can you go a bit earlier, or a bit later?

(I might sometimes say VAXen instead of VAXes, but it doesn’t quite feel right any more.)

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I had access to a VMS VAX summer of 1979, and we had one VAX 780 running BSD 3 at Brown University from 1979 to about 1988. Added another 780 about 1981, then a 750 a few years later.

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First: a VAX-11/780 running VMS in autumn 1979 at university.
Last: a MicroVAX-II running Ultrix (at DEC) in 1993.

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