DEC find

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_mcmanis.com>
Date: Tue Jan 2 21:27:38 2001

At 03:58 PM 1/2/01 -0800, you wrote:
>Wow! I hit gold! Wacky Willy's... I cleaned the Vaughn St. location of
>every DEC bit I could find.

Very cool, you've found a bunch of Q-bus bits, not Unibus bits. So please
don't mix them:


>M7606 AF, MicroVAX II w/1MB RAM and floating point
>2x M7608 BC/BF, 4-Mbyte RAM for microVAX II (Q22-bus)

The three above, put together into 3 Q/CD slots of a Q-Bus backplane, form
the basis for a MicroVAX II (and VAXStation II, and VAXStation II/GPX) this
is the MicroVAX CPU and 8MB of memory for it (creating a 9MB system total)

>M7164, Q-bus SDI disk adaptor, Q-22 (1 of 2)(what does that mean? Guess I
>need another board)

This is half an interface for DEC "SDI" drives, the most familiar is the
RA81 and RA82 type. (Very heavy drives) If you need the "other half" I can
help (I've got three extra sets I believe) :-)

>M7516 YM, Ethernet interface (replaces DEQNA) - what do I need to hook it up?

This then is your ethernet, it happens to be a "DELQA-T" or affectionately
known as the "Turbo" DELQA. Pretty much the nicest ethernet you can put in
a Q-bus VAX machine until you get to the DESQA series for the MV III.

>M3106, 4-line double-buffered async EIA MUX, with modem control; replaces
>M7957 - What do I do with this? It has a cable attachaed, p/n BC05L-03

Again, I (and probably others) can send you the "cab kit" for this board
which takes that cable and turns it into four DB-25 connectors. Generally
this mounts in one of the option holes in the back panel of the VAX.

>3x M3104 DHV11, 8-line async DMA MUX

This is the 8 line version of the above and a "quad wide" as opposed to the
dual wide 3106. If you're lucky you can find M3107's which are the line
line dual-wide versions. Again, if you need cab kits I tried to give them
away earlier and no takers.

>M7551 CA, 4-Mbyte 22-bit parity/CSR MOS RAM (what will this work with?)

This is for a PDP-11/23 or ll/73. Basically you can "fill" the memory space
for one of these processors with this board.

>M8053 MA, M8053 with DDCMP control ROM (point-to-point or multidrop) - huh?

This is a synchronous serial port that knows how to do DDCMP (the DECnet
serial protocol) You will find this comes in handy if you want to create a
DECnet link from a VAX to a PDP-11 (it can be easier than creating an
ethernet link sometimes)

>Non-DEC DEC stuff:
>Sigma Info Systems DZV11, some WDC chips on it and two 40-pin connectors

This is an async mux as well, the DEC cab kits work with it I believe.

>Emulex TU0210401

Don't know.

>National Semiconductor NS638 - tons of chips, looks like memory

According to my notes this is an 8MB RAM card for the MicroVAX II. (could
give you a total of 16MB when combined with the other two cards) Check to
see if it has the 50 pin connector on the right side (when viewed from the
front)

>Now, what do I do with all this stuff?

Well, several choices, one you could combine the M3106 + M7516 + M7606 + 2x
M7608 in a BA23 cabinet and create a diskless MicroVAX II. Bootable via MOP
into either VMS or NetBSD.

>What will work with my 11/84 and how do I set it up? My 11/84 is bare
>right now - just CPU and some memory. I don't even remember what exactly
>is in there right now, I'll have to go check later.

If the 11/84 is Unibus then I don't think you can do much with it, but if
you get a BA23 or BA123 you can have yourself a MicroVAX II in short order.

--Chuck
Received on Tue Jan 02 2001 - 21:27:38 GMT