Raspberry Pi, Did you get a Slice?

[iego]

Nerd stuff:

In the late 1970s Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) introduced the VAX 11/780, probably the best "mainframe" at the time. Being the first of its line, its speed established the VAX Unit of Processing, or "VUP" of one.

In 1980 I started working for DEC here in the 'springs. We had a bunch of 11/780s - they and their peripherals were monstrosities, about four or five refrigerators side-by-side in size. The 11/780 consumed huge amounts of power, with thick power cables hanging down from 100+ amp bus bars running overhead.

Remember, 1 VUP.

In 2015 the Raspberry Pi foundation released the Raspberry PI Zero - a tiny Pi about the size of two or three postage stamps.

Someone took a VAX instruction set emulator and put it on a Pi Zero, booted up VMS (the VAX operating system) and stuffed the Pi Zero inside a tiny VAX 11/780 MODEL (given out as a promotional item at DECUS, I believe).

Mind you, this thing can run on a 5 volt battery.

Its speed? Four VUP! Four VUP while EMULATING another computer's instruction set! My what a difference 39 years makes.

Info on this project can be found here.

O2

Ps. Ok, for the nerds that are still with me, this jogged my memory on another piece of trivia...

The setup: In "2001 A Space Odyssey" the main protagonist was the "HAL 9000" computer. What three letter acronym do you get if you take the NEXT letter in the alphabet for each of the letters H-A-L?

The trivia: What many people don't know is one of the major designers of DEC's VMS operating system, Dave Cutler, left DEC to join Microsoft to work on a new operating system called "Windows New Technology" or "WNT" (the grandfather of what we call "Windows" today). Well, what acronym do you get if you take the PREVIOUS letter in the alphabet for each of the letters W-N-T?

That's a great post, O2. I'm too young for VMS (and I am not young, lol) but do remember it, and certainly remember Windows NT. My first real experience with DEC was the DEC Alpha CPU, which was the first/only RISC CPU to run Windows NT (and VMS). I actually had two servers, Barney and Showboat, which were both DEC Alpha based NT Servers, for Exchange and Directory Services.

I grew up in the personal computer era, and every time someone came into my shop and started to show off with VAX/VMS, etc., I just smiled and nodded and, yeah, you go with your big iron.

-John

ps. I actually still have Barney (or at least part of it...)

...\Documents\From JohnAMD\JohnAMD-Documents\work\barney\dl\intel