Vaxbarn | Hacker News Reader

Vaxbarn

vaxbarn.com

88 pointsdcminter19 comments

> Welcome to VAXBARN, Camiel Vanderhoeven's computer collection, located in a 200-year old farmhouse in the tiny village of Netterden, in the east of the Netherlands, on the border with Germany.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX

[Serious comment] Dearie me, with that name I thought it was going to be something entirely different. I guess retro 1980s minicomputing has been namejacked by another topic.

Serious point was: I expect the SEO namespace of the former has been overrun by the latter; how do they manage?

If you look at the list of architectures, you can see that the collection does contain a number of artifacts related to actual VAXes: https://vaxbarn.com/collection/arch

Maybe those were the beginning of the collection, and how it got its name.

Also, the curator is a kernel engineer at VMS Software (see "About me" at the bottom of the home page), so he definitely knows what a VAX is.

You're completely missing my point. Of course a museum of retrocomputing would contain DEC VAX et al.; nobody said otherwise; nobody quibbled the bona-fides of the curator.

I legitimately asked how they actually manage with the SEO namespace having been namejacked by another unrelated topic, which is heavily associated with endless flaming. It occurred to me that I haven't seen the term 'vax' on social media in the old sense for several years now. It's been overrun. (If you go on Reddit and search "vax museum" or "Can I see a VAX in a museum?", zero of the top hits are relevant.)

What are you even talking about?

Stop being rude. For the third time, I posted a legitimate inquiry how the set of people using 'VAX' in the now-niche sense 'retrocomputing' manage to handle the SEO namespace for 'VAX' since 2020 being overrun with unrelated posts about vaccines and all sorts of partisan political theories.

Like I said, an inquiry for "Can I see a VAX in a museum?" these days gives zero relevant top hits on e.g. Reddit.

(This question is analogous to what happened to many existing businesses or brands that contained the name 'ISIS' in 2013.)

I imagine most people talking about old VAX machines don't care about SEO. And I doubt there were ever any relevant top hits for "Can I see a VAX in a museum?" on reddit since day one.

But none of that matters, because if you wanted to ask or search for that, you would do it in one of the relevant subreddits. And if I search for "vax computer" on Google I get plenty of good results on the first page.

You're making this into more of an issue than it is.

Funny how brains work.

For me the order of association was:

1. IKEA Product?

2. Something to do with VAX computers

…

3. I had to think tens of seconds about what your comment refers to but I find it perfectly valid that you had a different order of association.

> 1. IKEA Product?

In Swedish it means wax child.

Pluralized as Vaxen. And for some humor... https://www.hactrn.net/sra/vaxen.html

Ah, halon. Fortunately never was around when we had an activation, but I knew other people who kept their running shoes on.

There's also the Computer Sheds (Jim Austin's collection): https://www.computermuseum.org.uk/. I should count how many I've used or at least been around...

I used HLH Orions for a couple of years as an undergraduate at Heriot-Watt in the 1980s. I don't think I ever actually saw the machines I used - ormazd and oberon.

Interesting, the guy is 3 years younger than me, and I'm too young to have worked through the minicomputer era. I very briefly had a job where I had to do some account administration that involved a VMS machine among others, in 98, and that's it. I do find those machines and VMS very interesting, so I can understand the enthusiasm. In any case, it's interesting to see people deep dive into these topics who don't have a nostalgic past association with them.

“ I work as a kernel engineer at VMS Software, Inc., and I am one of the architects for the port of the OpenVMS operating system to the x86 processor architecture.” he just happen to be in the right place at the right time with the right skill set.

I had the same thought. I am 2 years older but never worked on those kinds of machines. I have never met anyone that worked on non-x86 machines but then again; most people I meet are younger. I did work on a OS360 once for 2 weeks.

No non-x86? Really? You must have worked with SPARC machines in the early part of your career, no? I had one (Sparcstation) at my desk, 1999, 2000 and all my work deployed to a cluster of Solaris SPARC machines. My first (non-hacked) Unix shell account was on an HP-UX machine in my sister's electrical engineering lab that she let me log into (thanks sis). And my roommate had a hot sexy DEC Alpha box. And of course there were personal machines like PowerPC and 68k Macs, and I owned a 68k Atari ST, and 6502 VIC-20, etc. There was actually a fair amount of diversity up until about 2005, 2006 or so when x86 just finished eating everything and Apple was the last holdout and then switched to Intel as well.

But minicomputers and VAXes generally, they were goners before the mid-90s.

OpenVMS, the OS for Vaxen, runs on Intel's Itanium processors since 2001. Recently it was ported to X86-64.

There's als the "Vaxman museum" in germany: http://vaxman.de/museum/museum.html

But I'm not sure if it's still around and if you can visit it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com