I think it was slightly later. I joined mid-1980 and VAXes to replace the 11/70 were being discussed but had not arrived. We needed to convert a lab into a VAX machine room and decide between BSD and Reiser, all of which happened in the second half of 1980.

Reiser Unix got demand paging a little later, and it was spectacularly fast. I remember being gobsmacked when I saw a demo in early 1981.

Dead ends everywhere.

-rob

On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 3:57 AM Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> How long was research running on a PDP-11 and when did they move to a VAX?

London and Reiser had ported Unix to the VAX, replete with virtual memory, in 1978. By the time v7 was released (1979), Vaxen had become the workhorse machines in Research.

Doug