Building a *REAL* VAXcluster 

Wow, this one has been in the works for a few months. After repairs, configuration, school holidays, sick kids, filming and a massive amount of editing (so you don't get too bored), this one is finally done!

In 1984 I composed a business brief labeled "Cloud Computing Solution" for a large Pulp Mill situated in New Augusta MS. The basic scheme was showing users with VTxxx terminals all connected to Dec Terminal Servers, sitting on a shared Ethernet network with application and data services provided via VAXCluster comprised of DEC VAX 11/780 systems and DEC HSC storage nodes connected to a Star Coupler. It depicted that the application servers, and the databases lived in a cloud, where users would access the data via the apps over both local area and wide area networks. Little did I know that this would accurately describe modern-day cloud computing by simply replacing the terminals with personal computers and the VAXCluster subsystem with now current server-side apps and databases.

As someone who is too young to remember the unix wars, I love watching videos like this and seeing the cool and unique hardware that was out there.

These clusters were pretty much bullet proof and some of our largest customers relied heavily on them, great to see the setup again, it's been a while.

Love your videos, did my first internet coding in C on VMS on a VAX cluster in the early 90s.

Andy Goldstein, who worked on VMS and VAX, did a lovely series of videos for VSI on VAX clustering, if you're into technical stuff like that.

Wow, the last 3400 I saw was about 25 years ago sitting in the corner of my office, that was our spare one, the company I worked for at that time had a couple of others in production plus a few of the smaller 3300 boxes. I was a big VMS fan at the time but around about then I changed jobs and moved into a Unix environment and initially absolutely hated Unix, especially that crumby vi editor after the luxury of edt/eve. Just recently I fired up VMS in simh as a way to visit an old friend and it felt totally foreign, primitive even and I couldn't remember much at all. There was a lot of VMS vs Unix banter back in the day but I guess the one you vote for is the one you're familiar with. VMS and the VAX hardware was super reliable though, I recall once heading out to perform a VMS upgrade on a 3300 that I hadn't physically seen for about a year but when I got there I couldn't find it, it couldn't have been moved because it had never gone down, it turned out that they'd re-furnished that office space some time previously and just built the new furniture around it, I had to call a carpenter in so I could get to it !! Very interesting video, thank you.

I was worked a lot with VAX and Alpha servers with OpenVMS and TRU64. This was my favourite part of my career in IT. Thanks for filming and share. Digital lover forever...!!!.

Cool, brings back a lot of memories about when we could actually touch the data center hardware.

Fun to see the old MicroVAX, had several of these at work that ran VAXELN. Since our Microvaxes had no local disk they would load their OS off the vaxstation 3100 cluster (had 5 in a cluster, 3 by the time I left).

Quantum made DSSI disks for a while. There was also an adapter from CMD which allowed SCSI disks to be connected to a DSSI bus.

Love seeing old server hardware I have no idea about. All I've really had experience is with ALPHA CPUs.

Had two of them at Fujitsu Munich GmbH - running 2 Fujitsu Super Eagle - good times, thanks for sharing

Bringing back fond memories, thanks for doing this

I started out implementing a 2 node Decnet between two 11/70's via RS-232 at (I think) 9600 baud. It seemed like magic at the time.

Love this channel!

I had to gasp when you handled that 370MB drive because around when it was released I was still messing around with RA-80's and the like.

that was fantastic. thanks for filming. love watching the setups. thanks so much!

OpenVMS is blackmagic for a BSD novice like me.. amazing stuff. amazing channel

Great video about building a cluster. But you left out demonstrating one of the most valuable features of a cluster - setting up a common SYSUAF and RIGHTSLIST then mounting the disks /CLUSTER, so you can access the disks on either system, without using DECnet. But still, great video.

Nice setup, better than the one at Madame Tussauds

Had these at Ford Motor Co

Awesome !!