Vax
Unit of
Processing.
The unit of performance for Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX line of minicomputers. VUPs were specific to the VAX architecture and the VMS operating system. However, 1 VUP was the speed of the VAX 11/780 which executed roughly 1 million instructions per second (1 MIPS) so VUPs are roughly equivalent to MIPS.
When I started college we had two VAX 11/750s, which were rated at 0.6 VUPs. This means, realistically, they were 6/10ths of a VAX. In 1990 we got a VAX 6220 which was something like 4 or 5 VUPs with its dual processors. We were flying.