Just a little side note... my company bought a VAX 11/780, serial number 13, which was the 3rd one DEC shipped (DEC kept the first 10 in house).
Monash university (where I didn't work) had 11/780s with very unusual memory boards: they had de-soldered the chips and replaced them with bigger ones, with one leg bent "up" like a cockroach waving hello. These were tied to spare lines on the backplane somehow, to make the machine have double the address space because of "one extra bit" -I suspect they were getting round high cost memory boards from the original source.