A visit to Jim Austin’s Computer Collection at Fimber, East Riding of Yorkshire
The plural of VAX is VAXen. I read it in a VAX/VMS computer manual in the nineteen-eighties.
VAX (Virtual Address Extension) computers were made by DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) and ran the VMS (Virtual Memory System) operating system. Most universities had them: first the VAX-11/780s and later the VAX 8600s. They usually had several connected in clusters – clusters of VAXen.
A DEC 'dumb terminal' |
I returned full of enthusiasm, thinking of the blog posts I could write. My wife was not impressed.
“Great! A barn full of old grey metal cabinets.”
“Well, some are black. And you can open the doors.”
I babbled excitedly about all the machines I had known so well: the Elliott 903, IBMs, ICLs, PDP-8s and PDP-11s, SWTPC minis, LSI-11s, Sun microsystems, Silicon Graphics, VAXen …
"VAXen!" My wife ran out of patience.
“Did they come in boxen? Ordered by Faxen? Would we call our fridge and freezer Electroluxen? VAXen makes them sound like little animals – or the name of one of Santa’s reindeers.”
“Reindeer(s?)”
Now there’s another plural to think about.
Other posts about computers:
![]() Flight Simulator |
![]() |
![]() |
Clusters of VAXen... delivered in boxen, by FedExen :D
ReplyDeleteHa!
Delete