VAX 11/780 anyone with some working experience out there?

From: John Lawson <jpl15_at_panix.com>
Date: Wed Dec 25 15:43:01 2002

On Wed, 25 Dec 2002, Gunther Schadow wrote:

> Although it's still looking pretty bad. I'm afraid the cold
> garage is causing some damage to the VAX. I did run the TEST

   Here in the northern Sierras, it's in the teens at night... white Xmas,
yada/yada... which is why the 11/44 is nestled snugly in the dining room
next to the fridge. A quick look at the Tech Manual shows the operating
environmentals to be 41 - 122 F and 10 - 95%RH non-condensing for the CPU
itself, and 50 - 104 F and 40 - 66%RH for peripherals. The nominal
environment is 70F/45%RH. I don't know what the figures are for an 11/780,
but I bet it's in that range.

  Recently I have acquired 24 RL02 packs of various descriptions that I
have been going thru to see whats on them (one has a bootable RT11FB V5.1:
woo-hoo!). The packs are in the (unheated) garage, and I've been keeping
a few in the house to acclimatize as I check them. One, I brought in
cold, let it sit in the drive for half an hour, and then loaded it.
Although it spun up and came 'ready', it was not a happy disk until it had
been run for about two hours, when the random errors finally smoothed out.
I was concerned that I was going to crash my only RL02 drive.

  I'd sure like to be able to have The Machinery in one room and me in
another, but no such luck... and I know plenty of folks who spent long
years working in big machine rooms... 90+ dB all the time... no thanks.
The 11/44 fans I find especially annoying - something about the timbre and
spectrum of that sound really grates on me after a few hours... but I'm
stuck with the machine in the house until summer, or I get a place with
enough rooms to have a Computing Facility Wing, raised floors, heavy
power, seperate HVAC.... dream on!

  Anyway - maybe a check of the lower operating temp bounds might shed
some light on why your machine is Grumpy...


  Cheers and Best of the Season!

John
Received on Wed Dec 25 2002 - 15:43:01 GMT