Case study: VAX: Offshoot of a sturdy family tree

Designed more than a decade ago, the Digital Equipment Corp. VAX is one of the longest-lived major computer lines in the industry. Only IBM's 360 architecture, first plotted in 1963, is older and perhaps more popular. The VAX family covers a much wider performance range than any other — from the 725, which handles half a million instructions per second, to the 8978, at 50 million instructions per second (MIPS).