New toy: VAX with DECVoice

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_mcmanis.com>
Date: Sat Jul 21 12:23:33 2001

At 12:39 PM 7/21/01 -0400, R.D. Davis wrote:
>Please note: quite some time ago, I mentioned ordering something from
>a company called Techs R Us, in Texas, via E-Bay that, hadn't arrived
>yet. There was a reason for the (very) long delay in the shipping of
>this computer system; the lady who owns the computer business selling
>it had a health problem and was unable to ship it at the time.

I'm glad you got your stuff. I've had a couple of ebay sellers tell me that
they practically dragged themselves off their deathbed to send me the thing
I had bought a couple of months ago from them. I guess this is supposed to
make me feel charitable, however since you can actually send e-mail FROM
your deathbed I would think a responsible seller would send email to folks
where transactions were complete explaining thie before they had sent mail
to them indicating that the next stop was Fraud Recovery services. The
techs-r-us guys have done this for a long time, heck they even have a store
front, which means they probably have at least one able bodied employee.
Some how I find it hard that for the last couple of years their shipping
department has relied on the filing health of on person.

>After extracting the VAX from the box and unwrapping it, I discovered
>the following: a rather ordinary VAX with what appears to be 16MB of
>RAM, a KA660 CPU and two 300MB DSSI disks... and other interesting
>bits described below.

Well the fun thing about the 4000/200 is that it is the fastest "Qbus only"
VAX. At 5 VUPs its great to run VMS on as a server, or NetBSD.

>Seeing what appeared to be terminated miniature SCSI connetor and a
>centronics connector, I was hoping to find a SCSI board in the system, but
>no such luck.

That would be the DSSI connector, looks like SCSI but it isn't. Hopefully
it had the terminator plugged into it. The centronics connector is there
because both DSSI and SCSI are 50 pin busses and you can put either SCSI
_or_ DSSI drives in a BA213 (but not both) and if you are using it as an
extension box you connect to the appropriate connector. I've had on
DECSystem 5500 that used the SCSI side and a 4000/200 that used the DSSI
side (different chassis of course!)

>...what I did find, however: a dual height board labeled "Talon
>Technology Corporation" connected to a DB15 connector. This board has
>various numbers on it; not sure which one the model number is. Some
>of the numbers are: 100501-2, 01B14 and 1242344. Does anyone know
>what sort of critter this board is?

Dual height, DB15, sounds like a frame buffer but looking at some of the
chips will give you and idea.

>The other somewhat interesting find: a set of boards labeled M3135-01,
>M3135-02 and M3136. The M3135 boards appear to be something called
>DECVoice and the M3136 connects the M3135 to T1 telephone service. Is
>anyone familiar with these? It is correct to guess that this won't
>work with a regular home telephone line?

Thats correct. It also is a huge clue as to where this system came from,
I'm guessing it was surplussed from the National Weather Service. Were
there any tags or stickers on it? A lot of small VAXen with the DECTalk
modules were being used as automated weather information devices. (So the
Talon Tech board might hook it to a weather transmitter!)

>Once I finish disassembling it, extract any spiders and move it inside
>the house, I'll check it out, and see if it boots up. ...that is, if
>I can find any place to put it, which I should have thought of before
>buying it many months ago. Alas, it has neither a tape drive nor a
>CD-ROM drive. There's one cable that looks like the type that
>attaches to to a TK50 or TK70 drive, but no power connector in sight.
>Am I going to need a tray for the tape drive that plugs into the
>sockets on the backplane?

Did they actually remove the tape drive? Or is the panel missing? Also
which type of box is it in, BA400 or BA213? You didn't mention a tape
controller in the list of boards (M7559 is the TQK70) so perhaps they ran
it tape less. You can boot it from the network port, even when there is no
OS on it.)

I have to say I like the 4000/200. The monitor on the CPU is pretty nice,
and I actually have the _real_ -TM for that one so I can figure out what
its doing.

--Chuck
Received on Sat Jul 21 2001 - 12:23:33 BST