HUGE (Dishwasher Sized) COMMODORE Mainframe?

[commodorevic20.com]

About 15 years ago I was a local recycle depot where a HUGE Commodore branded piece of computer equipment showed up. My recollections of this piece of hardware are unfortunately vague, and I don't recall much else other than size (about the size of a dishwasher & very heavy), the fact it was branded Commodore (as well as having the appropriate Commodore logo), was white with some black accents (a black strip or name plate perhaps?) & I do recall it had a HUGE keyboard.

Darn parents got in the way & I wasn't allowed to bring it home. I saw it get loaded into the back of the truck, the driver told me they were going to scrap it for the gold on the boards.....

Does anyone know what this piece of hardware might have been? I've looked online a few times over the years but haven't been able to find any photos or info of what it might have been.

[rhurst]

IMHO, I would not be too surprised if it was a part of a PDP or a VAX you saw. Commodore ported their development for software engineering on to VAX back in the C64/C128 heyday. DIGITAL Equipment Corp was also enjoying its heyday at the same time, and its VAX computers/peripherals were very, very commonplace -- and so was putting the corporate logo on OEM.

And PDP (the VAX predecessor) and VAX were often scrapped for their metal content. One hospital I worked for paid over $250k for their first VAX, followed by a MicroVAX 6-years later for less than $60k at almost 3-times the speed. Technology changed very quickly, obsoleting DEC along the way.

[Schema]

So I wasn't dreaming after all!

http://sleepingelephant.com/ipw-web/bul ... 464Z&#7464

[6502dude]

I'm using a VAX cabinet as a drill press stand in my garage.

[ral-clan]

That's what I was going to say too: a VAX.

If you look at old usenet posts from Commodore employees, they are usually routed from (one of) Commodore's VAX(es).

Images:
http://www.netbsd.org/images/machines/vax/vax11-780.jpg
http://williambader.com/museum/vax/20vaxen.jpg
http://www.physiology.wisc.edu/comp/hist/vax1m.jpg

Interesting to think of what info could have been saved if that VAX had fallen into the right hands.

I see you're located in Vancouver. Is that where you saw this machine? I know of Commodore Canada's HQ in Toronto but didn't know it had one in Vancouver.

[rhurst]

Interesting to think of what info could have been saved if that VAX had fallen into the right hands.

It would have been interesting to see their development tools and libraries ... or perhaps it would have been shameful!

Seeing that picture of a LA210 hard-copy terminal and a VT52 on casters is going to bring me a nightmare tonight, for certain.

RSTS/E and VMS were pretty remarkable OSes in their day. OpenVMS on Alpha (and now Itanium) are still very much in service in many US government / VA hospitals today.

[Jeff-20]

http://www.netbsd.org/images/machines/vax/vax11-780.jpg

That's so hot! Like the Bat Cave Computer.

[PaulQ]

I spent 4 years of my computer career programming for the VAX platform (in OpenVMS, specifically), which was later superseded by Alpha. I feel good now, knowing the Commodore connection.

[amramsey]

RSTS/E and VMS were pretty remarkable OSes in their day.

Sure, remarkably bad! I used a vax machine in around 1990-1992 in university and VMS drove me nuts. I was taking programming languages on these things (Pascal and assembly) and all that worked pretty well, but navigating around in the disk structure was a pain in the *ss. Simple things like changing directories needed a 40 line script in order to make it work like it should (cd blahblah etc...). Assembly on on the VAX machines was fun though. I've still got my textbook from that course.

One bug I found with the VAX machine terminals that we used at school.... We were at a remote campus connect at 9600baud over leased lines and if you wrote a simple program which just displayed all the ascii characters from 0 to 255, the terminal would lock up solid. Of course I didn't realize that until I had accidently locked up 3 of the 8 terminals that we had. That happened on a friday and I showed up on monday to find that my user account had been locked by the teacher. He thought I had been trying to hack the system.... all he could see is that 3 terminals were hooped and I had zombie processes running on the mainframe.

We moved onto Sun workstations the next year and I was a much happier camper.

[commodorevic20.com]

Thanks for all the replies!

Yes, located near Vancouver. It was seen at a recycling depot in Maple Ridge (approx. 45 min drive east of Vancouver).

I've been wondering about this for many... many years - looks like mystery solved. So sad I wasn't able to save it. I'd jump at the chance if if something like that ever popped up again.

*sigh*...

Good to know though! Thanks!

[rhurst]

Yes, VMS is the antithesis to UNIX terse commands -- VMS DCL is the most verbose shell language, i.e., SET DEFAULT SYS$MANAGER to essentially do a `cd /root`. But then again, it too has aliases and search paths to accommodate the mundane.

the ascii characters from 0 to 255, the terminal would lock up solid.

Yes, software flow control (CTRL-S / Q) originating from the host would typically do that to a serial terminal -- but there was a VMS command (SET TERMINAL) that could have been issued to release the lock and free up the XOFF.

Sun Solaris? Now that was a remarkably bad implementation of UNIX.

Both had their moments and did what they needed to do well. I would not have bothered saving the C= "mainframe", just any source that could have been transferred off its storage. The rest is a space heater (or a drill press!)

[carlsson]

Sun Solaris? Now that was a remarkably bad implementation of UNIX.

Do you mean the very brief Solaris 1 based on SunOS 4.X (BSD-like) or Solaris 2+ based on SunOS 5.X (System V-like) ?