[Simh] VAX 8200

[Gary Lee Phillips]

In fact there's very little evidence on the web that the 8200 ever existed.
The first VAX I ever worked with (around 1985 or so) was an 8200 and there
was a point where I was convinced I had remembered the model ID incorrectly
because I could find nothing about it online. Then I found a promotional
button in my desk drawer, rectangular with rounded corners, that had a
photo of the floor-standing unit and the text "VAX 8200" on it. So I knew
it had existed. Must not have been a lot of them sold, though.

Anyway, yes, the console was an oddity. So was the terrible vacuum-less
tape drive built into the cabinet. We eventually purchased a real drive
with vacuum columns because you could never count on reading a backup tape
again after it was written. The system ran VMS 4.4 and performed reliably
otherwise. We eventually added a Microvax II and a PDP-11 to the complex.
The PDP ran RSX and operated as a routing link between the IBM mainframes
with JES2/MVS/TSO and the DECNet nodes. I even published an article about
using a custom symbiont to make the mainframe print queues look like a
regular VMS printer queue on the VAXen.

That was a galaxy long ago and far away. It would be fun to see a working
8200 in SimH, but sounds like a major job reconstructing it.

--Gary
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