Yet another VAX has landed

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_mcmanis.com>
Date: Sun Jan 7 00:41:08 2001

This is pretty cool, I have now got a BA212 based VAX for the House of VAX!
I just picked up a VAX 4000/200 in a BA212 chassis and it is the first one
I've ever seen outside of the MicroVAX "technical handbook"!

Fortunately it came with all the parts (only some minor disassembly that
was easily corrected). Unfortunately it did not come with the rack "drawer"
that mounts it into a 19" rack. This will have to be corrected. Hopefully
its presence will attract the necessary parts :-)

For those who don't know what it is, the DEC BA212 chassis is a "low
profile" rack mount chassis for a DEC Q-bus based VAX system. There is a
similar chassis called the BA213 which sits vertically consumes 27" of rack
real estate, and has drives in the top half and cards in the bottom half.
The BA212 leaves the drives in the "front" but _behind_ the drives is lays
a Q-bus backplane down horizontally "into" the rack taking up only 14" of
space. This is why you need the drawer sides because to get at the cards
you have to slide it way out of the rack!

Anyway, I've got the 4000/200 front bezel for it (the version of the
technical handbook I have doesn't mention the 4000/200 in this chassis
because I believe it was introduced later)

One of the neat features I discovered is that it has a couple of "feet" on
the front that props up the front of the chassis if you have it out of a
rack so that air can flow through it. Just really neat. I'll try to get
some pictures of it and put it up on my VAX pages.

--Chuck
Received on Sun Jan 07 2001 - 00:41:08 GMT