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{from Digital Livewire, 16-Aug-90}
Digital - Historical Collection acquires first VAX-11/780

 More than a decade after it was installed, the first VAX system has returned 
home. The very first machine in the VAX-11/780 product line -- the original
VAX product line -- has been acquired by the Digital Historical Collection
from Carnegie-Mellon University, where it has been successfully supporting 
researchers in the physics and chemistry departments for 12 years.

  In a university environment supported largely with timesharing on large
batch processing computing, the idea of a departmental minicomputer was new 
and untested. In fact, according to Dr. John Popel of the CMU chemistry 
department, only one National Science Foundation grant had ever before been 
made for this purpose.  

  But CMU's quantum chemists and high energy physicists needed more compute 
power than was economically available through timesharing, and more power than
any 16-bit minicomputer could deliver. The 32-bit VAX seemed to fit the bill
-- except that it was a new design, untested by customers. 

 Dr. Michael Levine of the CMU physics department, now Scientific Co-Director 
of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, remembers thinking that "to have the
two most computional-dependent groups at the university cast their fate with
this new machine -- with brand-new hardware and a brand-new operating system
--  was a bit of an act of faith."

 Their faith paid off. Dr. Popel "expected the usual troubles" with new
systems, but moving to the VAX proved "very easy." His complex quantum
chemistry programs were successfully converted to VMS in less than two weeks.
"It worked out much better than anyone had a right to hope," says Dr. Levine.
Soon the physics department had CMU's second VAX-11/780. And that was just 
the beginning. According to Jack McCredie, then the University's Vice Provost
of Information Technology, "before long there were dozens of VAX systems" on
campus.  

  To Jack, who is now director of External Research at Digital, the first VAX 
systems demonstrated "the success and cost-effectiveness of departmental
minis. They just spread around. The campus became a heavy user of networking
early on, when connecting the machines together made sense.
Pretty soon CMU was a model of a distributed environment."

 Now the system that started it all is history, replaced by a VAXstation 3500 
with almost three times the performance in less than half the space. Far from
retiring, however, VAX #1 will be an active part of the Historical
Collection's ongoing exhibition program.