Word: vax
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...task force spent $200,000 on a VAX minicomputer and then spent more than two years pumping more than a million bits of information into it. A specially designed software program helps detectives wade through crushing amounts of data on suspects, police tip sheets and details of similar homicides elsewhere in the country. Says Crime Analysis Supervisor Chuck Winters: "The computer is the heart of the investigation. But it's old- fashioned police work that will solve this case...
More important, sales of large IBM mainframe computers, which account for about 70% of the company's $50 billion in revenues, are being hurt by archrival Digital Equipment Corp. DEC sells the popular VAX line of so-called superminis--midsize computers that can do the work of low-end mainframe models, often at less cost. Companies that want to link many personal-computer users together into a network can sometimes do so more cheaply with a supermini as the central computer than with a mainframe...
...System 9370 computers are a line of superminis that at least one company official was privately calling "VAX killers." The firm expects the price ($31,000 to $210,000) and performance of the 9370s to be more than competitive with DEC's machines. To help launch the 9370s, IBM is augmenting its sales force with employees transferred from other divisions. One problem, though, is that the company will not be able to ship the 9370 line in large quantities until the second half of 1987. Says Computer Analyst Ulric Weil of the Gartner Group, a Stamford, Conn.-based research firm...
Furthermore, the complicated jargon of the VAX system so hastily memorized by frantic freshmen for the test is rarely even applicable to future use. Detailed command memorization obscures the underlying need for programming skills that students can apply to future encounters with technology. The VAX system, which connects all terminals to one main computer, frequently falls victim to system failures which halt the already rushed testing sessions and inconvenience test takers and graders...
Students have the option of opening low priority word processing accounts on Harvard's larger VAX computer system or buying word processing time from the Office of Information Technology. But council members on the committee said those options were either too difficult to use, unreliable or too expensive...