User manual

Computing at Entropy House

AppleSauce November 2003

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(BTW, you now understand why USB connectors will go

in only one way...)

In his piece a few pages back Wacek Jedrzejczak men-

tioned the VAX computer. The name means ‘Virtual

Address eXtension’ and VAXen were probably the most

popular minicomputer of their day, 1978 to the late

1980s. They were made by Digital Equipment Corpora-

tion (DEC) and followed the PDP series.

The operating system was called VMS: Virtual Memory

System. It wasn’t Unix, but even Unix aficionados

regarded it highly. It was secure, if slow (and it seemed

to get slower with each new release). It came with a good

(for its day) editor, compilers for Pascal, FORTRAN,

COBOL, C, etc, and a database called DataTrieve, whose

manual was written by an Australian, and therefore fea-

tured a Wombat.

Terminals were also made by DEC, with the most com-

mon being the VT100. They were ‘dumb’ devices, little

more than keyboard and monitor, but the VT100 did

have a set of commands to position the cursor, set bold

or flashing text, draw lines or boxes, and so on. That

command set became an ANSI standard, used by termi-

nal emulators all over.

DEC made its name with minicomputers, and had an

opportunity to be among the first with microcomputers,

but neglected it. It was later taken over by Compaq,

which in turn has been acquired by Hewlett Packard.

A VAX 11/780, just a

grey box. In practice,

there would be similar

grey boxes alongside

with extra disk and

tape drives, and

nearby, the grey wall

of VMS documentation

VT100 terminal: as

dumb terminals go

a relatively smart

device