New MV-II boots! And, of course, Questions....

From: Doc <doc_at_mdrconsult.com>
Date: Wed Apr 10 19:43:23 2002

On Wed, 10 Apr 2002, Zane H. Healy wrote:

> > I was hoping the BA23 would be quieter than the BA123. It's not.
>
> ?!?!? What's up with your BA123? My PDP-11/73 is one of the quietest
> machines around here, probably the only thing quieter is the latest two
> PC's and the G4/450 PowerMac. Have you got all the skins on it? Mine used
> to be fairly noisy, but the combination of getting all the skins, and
> switching to small 3.5" SCSI HD's has it so quiet it ran all night Sunday
> because I forgot it was on! (I've been running it enough lately I'm not
> looking forwards to my next electric bill!)

  Err, no skins. The BA23 came out of a rack, so the front bezel is all
there is. I _do_ have a set of skins, but the PDP-11/53 is wearing
them, and I'm not inclined to evict it. :) Probably if I turned the VAX
so the fans face the wall instead of me, it would help, too.
  When somebody donates a SCSI adapter to my collection, I'll be
divesting all the MFM drives myself. I'm not holding my breath.

> > The memory board, which is a DataRAM 63016 C0. Listed online as a 16M
> >board some places and 32M others. The system sees it as 2 16M boards.
> >Is this kosher?
>
> I suspect this is a trick on DataRAM's part to fit 32MB on one board. It's
> possible that the CPU will only recognize memory boards up to 16MB.

  Pretty much my guess, too. The disk has half of NetBSD on it (the
/usr/ tree is on a disk I don't have), but it boots far enough that I'm
reasonably certain it's actually got all the RAM the system reports.

   Thanks,
        Doc
Received on Wed Apr 10 2002 - 19:43:23 BST