DEC VAX computer architecture

[Mychaela Falconia]

Hello fellow retrotechnologists,

This morning (my UTC-8:00 time zone) there was a USSE-only OsmoDevCall,
but most of the topics discussed were more of RetroNetCall nature,
which I don't mind at all - I am a retrocomputist first and foremost,
and retronetworking goes quite well along with retrocomputing.

Somehow the discussion touched the recent Vintage Computer Festival
event that apparently happened somewhere in Germany (being on a
different continent with no current passport and no travel budget,
I am not exactly in the loop about European events), and it was
mentioned that someone brought a VAX machine (running VMS) to the
event, a model from the VAX 4000 family which I am not super-familiar
with.  (It's a quite late model as far as VAXen go, much newer than
those I play with, but it appears to be an NVAX-based machine that is
closer to a MicroVAX than a true VAX.)

DEC VAX computer architecture is a topic very near and dear to my
heart, as I worked on it very actively from late 1990s into early
2000s.  Most of my work with this architecture has been with Q22-bus
machines of MicroVAX II (MV2) and MicroVAX III (MV3) variety - to be
pedantic, DEC never had an official model named MicroVAX III, but the
informal designation MV3 is most fitting to describe the hw concoction
that results if one takes an MV2 system in a BA123 cabinet and upgrades
the CPU board from KA630 to KA650 or KA655.  I still have several of
these MV3 machines (some with KA650 and some with KA655) in my home
machine room, and one of them I even keep running and still use for
some everyday functions, mostly maintaining some notes in plain text
files in vi and occasionally producing some TPS reports with troff
suite.

I run my own version of 1980s UNIX on these MicroVAXen, a derivative
of 4.3BSD from UC Berkeley which I named 4.3BSD-Quasijarus back in
late 1990s.  The choice of name is certainly quite odd - I named it
after a certain alien world (or maybe interdimensional pocket would be
a better term) from Star Revenge sci-fi epic by Yury Petuhov - or
maybe Petukhov ought to be "officially correct" transliteration, I
dunno.  The difficulty of transliterating Russian names into ASCII
strings that can be pronounced by English-speaking tongues is a
recurring problem, and the name of that alien world is no exception.
In the original Russian, the name of that alien world or
interdimensional pocket or whatever it should be called is
\u041A\u0432\u0430\u0437\u0438\u044F\u0440\u0443\u0441
(yes, that's a Unicode string in C99 notation), and back in 1997 or
so, when I was a fresh migrant from Russia to USA and spoke more
Russian than English at home, I decided that Quasijarus was the best
ASCIIfied rendition of that Russian sci-fi name - and so my MicroVAX
UNIX OS was named.

As this dear-to-me ancient computer architecture was brought up in
this morning's ODC/RetroNetCall, I got into trying to explain the
difference between a true VAX (such as VAX-11/780, VAX-11/750,
VAX 8600, VAX 6000 series etc) and a much smaller MicroVAX - and then
someone jokingly said something like "there is also Anti-VAX".

How can I put it politely... I really, really don't like it when the
name of my beloved vintage computer architecture has been hijacked to
refer to a certain pharmaceutical product that is the antithesis of
everything I stand for - hence I ask people to please differentiate
between the two by using different spelling.  The slang abbreviation
for "vaccine" should NOT be "vax" - that's the name of the computer
architecture - so please call that thing "vaxx" instead.  Hence the
abbreviations should be:

pro-vaxer: someone in favor of DEC VAX computer architecture
anti-vaxer: someone against this computer arch (all RISC lovers etc)
pro-vaxxer: someone in favor of vaccination
anti-vaxxer: someone against those poison injections

By this terminology, I am very strongly pro-vax and equally strongly
anti-vaxx.  Any clearer now? :)

It is also worth pointing out that the plural form of VAX (as in
machines based on this CPU architecture) is VAXen, not *VAXes, just
like the plural form of "ox" is oxen and not *oxes.  (Asterisk prefix
before a word form is standard linguistic notation for malformed
words.)  To the best of my knowledge (I never got to live through that
history myself, but I once knew people who did), this plural form of
VAX was established back in 1980s, back when this computer
architecture was in active use, long before it transitioned to being
a retrotechnology in the care of people like me.  It certainly doesn't
help that spoken pronunciation of "VAXen" in most English dialects
sounds awfully close to that toxic pharma product, but oh well, what
can we do - changing the name of a Holy retrotechnology from decades
ago is NOT permissible for a maintainer and lorekeeper of said
retrotech.  At least it is very clearly distinct in ASCII-based
written communication.

Hasta la Victoria, Siempre,
Mother Mychaela