The VAX-11 is a discontinued family of 32-bit superminicomputers, running the Virtual Address eXtension (VAX) instruction set architecture (ISA), developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Development began in 1976.

The VAX-11/780, introduced October 25, 1977, was the first of a range of popular and influential computers implementing the VAX ISA. The VAX family was a huge success for DEC, with the last members arriving in the early 1990s.

The VAX-11/780 was the first member to ship of the VAX family of larger computers. The VAX series was conceived as the successor to the successful PDP-11 series of minicomputers; in order to make the VAX seem more PDP-11 friendly, they retained the -11 moniker for the first VAXen, and provided the ability to execute PDP-11 object code - hence ...

With VAX, DEC extended its PDP-11 minicomputer architecture from 16 to 32 bits. The first model in the VAX “superminicomputer” line was the VAX-11/780. The line rivaled “much more expensive mainframe computers in performance,” according to the online Computer History Museum.

Feb 20, 2012 · The F-15 and F-18 fighters, the Hawk missile systems, parts of the U.S. Navy submarine fleet, and Navy fighter test systems on aircraft carriers use DEC’s VAX minicomputers from the 1980s for ...

The individual stages of the CPU pipeline are: the I-Fetch stage, which sequentially fetches the In this paper we use a novel method to instruction stream into heInstruction Buffer or IB; characterize VAX-11/780 processor performance the I-Decode stage, which takes instruction bytes under real timesharing workloads [13].

<p>The VAX line of 32-bit “super-minicomputers” rivaled much more expensive mainframe computers. Its success made DEC the second-largest company in the industry. VAX, a “complex instruction set computer,” was widely cloned in Eastern Europe.</p>

This information was used to quell an internal attack on the (ultimately correct) performance claims of the VAX 8800. And the VAX 9000 architect carried around a marked up copy of the diagram with crossed-out entries, and updated values …

The VAX-ll/780 contains the CPU, memory management, bootstrap loader, standard instructions, 8K-byte parity bi polar cache memory, programmable real-time clock, time-of year clock (with battery backup), and 12K bytes of writable diagnostic control store.

Between 1977 and 2000, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) produced a wide range of computer systems under the VAX brand, all based on various implementations of the DEC-proprietary instruction set architecture of the same name. [1][2]