MicroVAX

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MicroVAX was a line of VAX computer systems which were manufactured by the Digital Equipment Corporation during the 1980s.

The MicroVAX II was based on a single, quad-sized 32-bit processor board and contained the MicroVAX chip (which included memory management), and ran under the MicroVMS or ULTRIX operating systems. The machine featured a floating-point coprocessor chip, 1MB of on-board memory, Q22-bus interface, Q22-map for DMA transfers, interval timer, boot and diagnostic facility, console serial line unit and time-of-year clock.

The MicroVAX 3500 and MicroVAX 3600 were introduced as the higher end complement of the MicroVAX family. The new machines featured more than 3 times the performance of the MicroVAX II and supported 32 MB of ECC main memory (twice that of the MicroVAX II). The performance improvements over the MicroVAX II resulted from the increased operating speed of the CVAX microprocessor (90ns) plus a two-level, write-through caching architecture.

In January 1987, MicroVAX 2000 was the first VAX system targeted at Universities and VAX programmers who wanted to work from remote locations.