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Comment by Galanwe | Hacker News Reader

Could someone shed some light on the constraints of Unix & VAX at the time?

The decision making here does not make much sense to a youngster (36) like me.

Why couldn't they just mount their half deleted drive on an other machine and restore it from there?

I have the feeling all these other hundreds of seemingly easier solutions were out of the realm of possibilities back then, but I am unsure of what were the actual limitations / constraints of that era.

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In the late 1970s/early 1980s VAX hard drives usually took cartridges which could be conveniently unplugged and carried across to a drive on another machine. But by 1986 drives were often "Winchesters" - sealed, rack width, a foot high, and weighing maybe 100kg. The cables were an inch thick and the plugs the size of a large ham and cheese sandwich. Hence the comment in the article that they'd need to pay a DEC technician to come out and physically do the move.

I'm not that familiar with the relevant systems, but this was before plug-and-play was a thing, and moving drives around wasn't a minor operation. Mario mentions a similar option in the article: "Another solution might be to borrow a disk from another VAX, boot off that, and tidy up later, but that would have entailed calling the DEC engineer out, at the very least. "

Most likely they didn't have a VAX in the same building they could do that with, so they had to improvise. These things were pretty big and expensive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX#/media/File:VAX_11-780_int...)!

They could have restored it on their current machine/disk FWIW. You could do a tape boot, boot to single user, and copy the OS and rebuild the devices. I think they were just unfamiliar with that process.

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