VAXmate was an IBM PC/AT compatible

personal computer A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...

introduced by

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unt ...

in September, 1986. The replacement to the

Rainbow 100 The Rainbow 100 is a microcomputer introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1982. This desktop unit had a monitor similar to the VT220 and a dual-CPU box with both Zilog Z80 and Intel 8088 CPUs. The Rainbow 100 was a triple-use ma ...

, in its standard form it was the first commercial diskless personal computer.

OS and files

The operating system and files could be served from a

VAX/VMS OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation A workstation is a special c ...

server running the company's VAX/VMS Services for MS-DOS software, which went through several name changes, finally becoming

Pathworks PATHWORKS (it was usually written in all caps) was the trade name used by Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Massachusetts for a series of programs that eased the interoperation of Digital's minicomputers and servers with personal computer ...

. Alternatively an optional expansion box containing either 20 MB or 40 MB hard disk could be purchased which allowed it to operate as a more conventional stand-alone PC.

Original specifications

The basic system contained an 8 MHz Intel 80286 CPU with 1 Mbyte of RAM, a 1.2 MB RX33 5¼-inch

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...

drive, a 14-inch (diagonal) amber or green monochrome CRT and a thinwire Ethernet interface all contained in the system unit. It was also provided with a parallel printer port and a serial communications port. A separate mouse and LK250 keyboard was used with the device. As well as the expansion box, an

80287 x87 is a floating-point-related subset of the x86 architecture instruction set. It originated as an extension of the 8086 instruction set in the form of optional floating-point coprocessors that worked in tandem with corresponding x86 CPUs. These ...

numeric coprocessor could be ordered as an option, and the memory could be expanded by 2 MB with another option to 3 MB. In North America, an internal modem was also available.

DECstation

It was superseded by the

DECstation The DECstation was a brand of computers used by DEC, and refers to three distinct lines of computer systems—the first released in 1978 as a word processing system, and the latter (more widely known) two both released in 1989. These compri ...

200 and 300 in January 1989.

References

Notes

External links

VAXmate at research.microsoft.com
{{DEC hardware IBM PC compatibles DEC computers Computer-related introductions in 1986