yeah we heard about the vax for several years at udel but my recollection is also around 1978 as "real" announcement.

A friend at DEC worked on microcode, one version of which made the vax into a pdp-8.

ron

On Tue, Apr 24, 2018 at 4:58 AM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com> wrote:

On 4/22/18, Clem cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>
> BTW if you want to be correct about dates - the DEC released the Vax in 76
> not 78 ( I personally used to program Vax serial #1 at CMU under VMS 1.0
> before I was at UCB which is what Dan had asked).

As I remember it, DEC announced the VAX in 1976 or 1977, and first
official customer ship didn't happen until 1978. Holy Cross had one
of the hardware beta machines in 1977. It ran a beta version of VMS
(version X0.5 initially). I ported a bunch of programs to the VAX,
including the PDP-10 version of Adventure.

-Paul W.