When I worked at Middlesex Polytechnic in North London, UK in the mid 1980s DEC actually gifted us with three of these things (we were a big DEC customer - Dec10 and several VAXen). We really had no idea what to do with them as they came with no useful software - as I remember only the OS (RTX of some sort, I think) and a rather good Lunar Lander game. They were also terribly unreliable - the internal bus was very flaky. We accidentally fixed this by carrying them in the back of a van between Poly sites - the vibration re-seated things, and later worked out that lifting them a few inches and then dropping them did the same.
I also had a DEC Rainbow, which made a very nice VT200 terminal, but was otherwise nearly as useless. I did actually write some software for it to support the Polys student application clearing service, which made use of an 8mb hard drive that came packed in a crate about as large as a dishwasher.
(author) Thank you! Was it because the cards fit badly on the CTI card edges or something else? These cards seem to be in pretty good. Doesn't look like Caltech did much with this one either. I need to get the other out and image its disk too.
I also had a DEC Rainbow, which made a very nice VT200 terminal, but was otherwise nearly as useless. I did actually write some software for it to support the Polys student application clearing service, which made use of an 8mb hard drive that came packed in a crate about as large as a dishwasher.
I was so happy when the first IBM XT arrived.
PS Good article!