The end is near … for VAX, anyway

Atop a 10-foot conference table in the basement of the WARF Building rests the once-cutting-edge VAX (Virtual Address eXtension) computer cluster. Purchased by the university in the 1980s, VAX transmitted then-novel data known as electronic mail to its users. Photo: Brian Moore

The venerable VAX, once the king of computing machines at UW–Madison, will have its plug pulled just before midnight on Dec. 31 – an ignominious end to an honorable career shortened by the ferocious speed of change.

Purchased by the university in the early 1980s, the VAX (Virtual Address eXtension) was originally freestanding and had the look of a mainframe. But now, after several upgrades, it occupies just the equivalent of a 10-foot conference table in the computer operations area of the WARF Building basement.

In fact, today the VAX cluster looks more like three high-end PCs. And in terms of capacity, that’s all it is – hardly a chip-buster, compared to what it used to be.

What it used to be was “quite the thing at the time,” says Al Krug, strategic consultant for the Division of Information Technology (DoIT). It made the university’s Sperry 1100, a big-as-a-bedroom mainframe, look like a computerus brontosaurus.

In its heyday around 1990, VAX provided service to nearly 4,000 campus users as the university’s first general-access e-mail machine with an Internet connection. It also powered research and instructional computing, enabled users to do mass e-mail for the first time and featured the first online campus directory at UW–Madison.

“VAX kicked off the e-mail explosion on campus,” says Kathi Dwelle, DoIT’s director of organizational effectiveness. One measure of that explosion: Within the first year, the number of accounts grew from almost 1,000 to more than 2,500, which required 100 modems for dial-in connections. In contrast, now more than 2,500 modems are needed to provide dial-in service for the more than 50,000 campus users of WiscWorld.

The remaining users of VAX, numbering 200 to 300, are moving to more modern machines. Krug warns that any VAX user still on the system without a transition plan should contact him right away, for the end is near.

But resurrection could be just around the corner for this VAX. It still has value on the surplus market, but because of the Y2K bugaboo, lots of VAX computers are being dumped on the market, driving the price down with each passing day.

The VAX computers and their VMS operating system are far from dead. Now owned by Compaq through an acquisition of Digital Equipment Corp. in 1998, VAX/VMS systems today run most of the world’s financial markets and more than half of the world’s cellular telephone billing systems, and generate more than $5 billion in sales for Compaq.

Those factoids provide cold comfort to VAX fans at UW–Madison. As the stroke of midnight approaches on New Year’s Eve, some VAX diehards may even clink their glasses in thanks to the machine that helped answer the now-archaic question:

What the devil is e-mail?