VAX 8600 lot hauled (was: Austin Texas UT Auction)

From: Jerome Fine <jhfine_at_idirect.com>
Date: Thu Jun 14 16:12:40 2001

>Zane H. Healy wrote:

> I hope you realize that with a MicroVAX II, especially in a BA123, the most
> desirable part is the chassis itself, even if it's not all there. It took
> two BA123's and some loose parts from a friend for me to have a complete
> chassis with all the panels. So I've got one good BA123, and one that can
> be used, or can be a parts donor to the other.

Jerome Fine replies:

Maybe where you live that is true, but I can't say that anyone here in Toronto
except for myself thinks that way. And no one seems to be close enough to
be interested in two dead BA123 boxes that I have had for the past two
years. In one case, I am reasonably confident that the "power" capacitor in the
circuit to convert the AC to DC is no longer there - at least just the two ends
of the wires were all that were left after that "magic smoke" disappeared. The
other box will no longer allow me to boot the M8189 board that I used for a
test. I would be VERY happy to trade the two non-working power supplies
for one working one. I suppose that if that does not happen within a year,
anyone can have both boxes for local pickup. Anyone interested?

I also have a number of ESDI disk drives and RQD11-EC controllers that
I would be interested in trading for either one 11/93 or the hardware needed
to set up ether net between the PDP-11 and a PC running E11.

I also have a number of RL02 disk packs and perhaps 2 RL02 drives. Eventually,
all the stuff in the basement must be sorted and either trashed or given away or
traded. Since I only use hardware to run PDP-11 software, nothing special
is required - as long as I can lift it with one hand for at least ten seconds -
convert that to 600 seconds for you younger fellows.

One thing that I would like to repair is a real DEC TU-58 (tape drive) in the
external box. These were often used with a PDP-11/44. The one I have
does not seem to work any longer and on occasion, I need to test the
DD(X).SYS device driver with real hardware to make sure it works with
new versions of the software. Also, can anyone help with finding boot ROMs
that can handle the TU-58? I suspect that I would put the boot ROMs in
a multi-function board in a Qbus backplane to boot with a dual 11/73
(M8192). In the meantime, once I can get the TU-58 to work again,
I will connect it to the COM2: port on a PC and use it to boot RT-11.

Think about that. A 25 year old tape drive with a total capacity of
250 KBytes running a 25 year old operating system (for a CPU that
originally ran at about 2 MHz) now running on a PC clocking in at
1.4 GHz with a 30 GByte hard disk drive. And the bottleneck is the
serial cable between the TU-58 and the PC running at 9600 baud
or about 1 KBytes per second transfer rate - to say nothing of the
SERIAL search time between the different 512 blocks on the tape
that looks like a disk drive - DD(X).SYS - to the rest of the RT-11
operating system software.

Sincerely yours,

Jerome Fine
Received on Thu Jun 14 2001 - 16:12:40 BST