August 18, 2000 (idea)

I found this today on yesterday's LWN. Compaq (aka the bastards who bought Digital) have announced September 30 2000 as the last order date for a VAX. Specifically, that is the last date for ordering a MicroVAX (the only type of VAX left), models 3100-88, 3100-98, 4000-108, and various upgrades and options.

I learnt UNIX on a VAX 11-780 running 4.2 BSD (not Ultrix, thank Heavens); that was my only brief exposure. Much later, I laughed at a friend who was stuck with some MicroVAX running VMS (and an X11 server!). So my connection to Vaxen was minimal. But it is still sad to mark the (expected) passing of an architecture.