That's the one! I happen to have what is a fairly complete collection of all of the 'chip' VAX cpus (for Qbus) starting with the KA610 (MicroVAX I), through the KA692 (VAX 4000/700a), and its fascinating to watch the architecture go from a nearly pure microcode implementation to a nearly pure 'gate' implementation. From the perspective of looking at the tradeoffs of microcode vs gates it is really an excellent tutorial on computer architecture.
If we want a microcoded architecture, I'd prefer the PDP-10, but that's me.
How much more complex is a mostly-microcode VAX implementation compared to a MIPS? The point about being able to move stepwise up the hardware complexity ladder by progressively replacing microcode with gates is a really good one, though.
