This might have been the crucial point, where DEC missed the microcomputer boat. In early 1985, the only full 32-bit single-chip processor that was generally available was the Motorola 68020. The Intel 386 would come out later that year. DEC was focused on the high end though. Much of the R&D was going into high-end designs with rack-sized arrays of ECL logic for the processors in their VAX mainframes and vector supercomputers, which they never sold very many of. The later CMOS NVAX design, when process shrunk, ended up being faster than the $1 billion ECL VAX 9000 line not long after it was introduced.
While collecting VAXen is usually reserved for those with gratuitous amounts of free space and lots of cheap power, I'm happy to have the 78032's successor, the CVAX SOC, running in my datacenter (it's slow - be patient):<p><a href="http://vlc.zia.io/" rel="nofollow">http://vlc.zia.io/</a><p>It includes the 78034, the floating point unit, and up to 8K of L1 cache in a single CPU package. The "up to 8K" was because they'd keep CPUs if 5K or more of L1 worked.<p>It's my little piece of this interesting history.
After the eastern bloc copied this chip, DEC engineers had a special message for the Russians:<p><a href="https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html" rel="nofollow">https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html</a>
I did some development on uVAX in 1989. Wrote a DECWindows app that did monitor & control of a distributed realtime system. DECWindows was slow, so it would get updated every 250ms, while the realtime stuff communicated to a proxy (via 10Mbps DECNet with a custom driver) every 20ms. All of the code was in 'C', but everything aside from the DECWindows stuff was running from ROM on embedded VAXELN.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECnet" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECnet</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAXELN" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAXELN</a>
Sydney University (Basser CS) had a few 11/780s. It may have run AUSAM, a modified 6th edition.[0]<p>It was a rush to go from sharing one with 40 other students to my first job where I had a microvax all to myself!<p>[0] <a href="https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=AUSAM" rel="nofollow">https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=AUSAM</a>