Resellers mourn death of DEC Vax

News that Compaq is to finally pull the plug on Vax, the line of servers that had served the channel so well for decades, has saddened young and old alike.

News that Compaq is to finally pull the plug on Vax, the line of servers that had served the channel so well for decades, has saddened young and old alike.

"Vax paid for my first house and put my kids through school," said one reseller.

Vax hardware - room-filling 5ft-tall machines used for the centralised processing of data - was born in the 1950s. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) achieved enormous success with its creation, and Vaxes successfully populated corporations, local authorities and universities the world over.

However, in the 1990s DEC was taken into care by Compaq, and the Vax was forced to share a home with more aggressive servers with a higher capacity and very different views on the distribution of computing resources.

On 16 August, Jesse Lipcon, vice president of Compaq's high performance server division, said: "We've extended the Vax CPU as far as possible. Demand is rapidly diminishing."

For many, this clinical statement did little to honour the contribution of a technology that was the foundation of the IT industry.

Vaxes were everywhere in the early days of computing. "People lived by them," said John Tyson at Keltec, a Compaq/DEC reseller. "Now everyone's margins have gone software."

Ironically, although the computing philosophy of the old timer frequently jarred with the newer generation, many of its supposedly outdated ideas have been adopted today.

"We dismissed centralised computing as old hat and opted for distributed computers," confessed Andy Mulholland, chief technology strategist at Cap Gemini. "But later, companies have found the old ways really were best. The flip side of distributed computing was that your IT was, in both senses of the phrase, all over the place."

First published in Computer Reseller News