The VAX 8000 is a discontinued family of superminicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) using processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA).
The 8000 series was introduced in October 1984 with the 8600, taking over the high-end of the VAX lineup. Originally known as the 11/790, it offers performance roughly four times that of the earlier 11/780. It was succeeded by the 8650 (formerly the 11/795) in December 1985. January 1986 saw the introduction of the 8200 and 8300 families in the mid-range. The 8800 replaced the 8600s at the high end in 1987, with the 8700 and 8500 being lower-performance versions of these systems. DEC also offered various clusters of these machines with a variety of model numbers. As with other VAX systems, they were sold with either the VMS or Ultrix operating systems.
It was intended that the 8800 was to have been replaced by the VAX 9000 on the high end, but this project failed. Instead, the VAX 6000, originally a mid-range model replacing the 8700/8500, was upgraded to provide almost the same level of performance of the 8800 but at half the cost. All of these were replaced by the VAX 7000/10000 in July 1992. These are single-chip implementations based on the NVAX CPU and are the final dedicated VAX machines.