Info needed: VAXStation 3520 & others...

From: Huw Davies <H.Davies_at_latrobe.edu.au>
Date: Wed Jul 23 20:31:18 1997

At 03:57 PM 7/23/97 +0000, Daniel A. Seagraves wrote:

>Lucky for me the man who runs it is a nice guy. And for about $100-200, I
>may be able to get my hands on an 8550. Assuming I can re-assemble it,
>it's been taken apart.

This may be a real challenge. The Nautilus based systems (8800, 88x0, 8700,
85x0) have an interesting back plane using zif sockets. When the systems
run they run, but when they go bad, they're horrible to fix. I spent a fair
part of the last three years doing user maintenance on 8800s and an 8820
and I can tell you now that fixing these beasts can be a real pain. In
particular, the diagnostics are unreliable at best. Even the professionals
have problems, we had a Digital maintained 8800 die and after two weeks of
three engineers they finally decided to ship a new system down from Sydney.
Fortunately we managed to convince management to upgrade to newer systems.


 Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies_at_latrobe.edu.au
 Information Technology Services | Phone: +61 3 9479 1550 Fax: +61 3 9479
1999
 La Trobe University | "My Alfas keep me poor in a monetary
 Melbourne Australia 3083 | sense, but rich in so many other ways"
Received on Wed Jul 23 1997 - 20:31:18 BST