Vaha (VAX)

(Machine, Yugoslavia)

DEC's 32-bit machine, with its record-managing operating system (RMS) and virtual memory paging. There were two of these cupboards in the city - we had one in stour, and The Bank had the other one. The VAX was actually peddled as ID 4850 or some other label, and they pretended that they are actually manufacturing them. The manufacturing consisted of peeling the original DEC labels off and putting their own. And, ah, yes, at least for the PDPs, the previous model, they had translated some of the OS messages into slovenian, including the one if you do a shutdown after midnight, "Nakonec, bila je že krajnja ura. Zdaj že ni kava ne pomaga." (Finally, it was really about time. Now even coffee doesn't help anymore.".

Other machines in the city were the old IBM 360, shared among sdk, textile industry, city hall, social security and the construction enterprise; kombinat had an NCR Criterion; textile kombinat had bought a second hand larger IBM in 1988 from the croatian police (and found the disks not erased, with all the files one would ever want), which took the whole basement of a former elementary school because each disk was the size of a washing machine, and Bangro had a Honeywell (aka Hanibal). Don't know what the metal industry had at the time, but I guess they already went for just PCs, without a big iron in the center.


Mentions: Really, why?, 23-VIII-1987., september 1987., 05-X-1987., 12-XI-1987., First allnighter, 15-XI-1987., 23-XI-1987., 26-XI-1987., 27-XI-1987., december 1987., 15-I-1988., 19-IV-1988., 07-VI-1988., Ljubljana, 01-XII-1988., 29-XII-1988., january 1989., Interest calculus, 17-XII-1990., 02-V-1992., 25-V-1992., june 1992., 15-I-1995., 05-XII-1998., 10-II-1999., 29-III-2007., 12-XII-2010., 20-VIII-2014., 10-V-2019., Antal Sič, Bangro, juski, kombinat, Radovan Fišer (Mika Fišer), sdk, stour, in serbian