One of the first minicomputer systems that I worked with extensively was a Digital Equipment Corporation’s VAX machine. The particular machine that I used, a VAX 11/730, was at the time (1983) an entry-level minicomputer that cost just under $40,000 (that’s just the CPU!) and delivered real-world performance of about 0.15 MIPS.
Category Archives: Retrocomputing
Desktop Computing circa 2000
I ran across a few photos I’d originally taken for equipment inventory purposes at The Parent Institute back in early 2000. It’s remarkable how much everyday technology has changed in the ensuing years.
(Click the image above to view a small album of semi-ancient technology)
Online Stock Trading System circa 1997
February 2014: I found these photos of the equipment used in one of my early security consulting projects. This was the gear used to support Europe’s first Internet-accessible stock trading system:
There were two firewalls in this configuration (separating the DMZ from internal and external networks), plus two application processors. All of these were built atop Sun Ultra 1 systems (each one featured a 143 MHz processor, 32M RAM, and a 1GB disk for about $16,000 in 1997 dollars).