Thursday mini-haul

From: Jason McBrien <jbmcb_at_hotmail.com>
Date: Thu Feb 28 23:36:58 2002

Ran out to University of Michigan Property Disposition yesterday. First the
interesting things I didn't buy:

A bunch of DECServers in - A PDP/11 RACK. Some dunderhead stripped the rack
to make room for DECServer/200s.
  which, in all honesty, are probably faster. The facia was beautiful,
vintage 70's computer.
  "PDP 11/<don't remember> Digital Equipment Corporation, Maynard
Massachusets"
An empty HP/3000 Rack.
A few RS/6000's, one almost complete.
A couple of 8x4.3GB RAID racks, fully populated for $300 each. Almost worth
it.
A DEC R400X pedistal storage expansion unit.
A bunch of SBUS ethernet cards. 100Base-T I'm assuming, they were third
party.
A couple of wierd Xylinx boards with Intel 960 processors on them. I'm
assuming really beasty SCSI controllers cause of the SCSI high density type
jack on the back of them.
A few HP FDDI cards.
A bunch of ISA SCSI Cards, medium-old brand Adaptec.

Here's what I made off with:
Cabletron 24-port ethernet hub w/ fiber uplink.
Sun 1.3GB External SCSI drive box, the one in IPC/IPX form factor. Now I can
finally test those ELC's I picked up :)
Ann Arbor Audio Stereo Computer Mixer <-- Cool gadget, mixes computer and
two other audio sources
 into an RCA line out and two headphone jacks.
Dell Dimension P-90 <-- To run BeOS. Slow, but a whopping 96MB of RAM. Not
bad for $25.
A few 2MB 30-pin SIMMs <-- To upgrade a few compact Macs I have.
VMEBus PrestoServe Board <-- For my Sun 4 which I'm still working on. Guess
it's gonna run SunOS :)
iMac 333 <-- Got it CHEAP. Gonna be a friend's internet computer. Nice
upgrade from his Performa 475.




----- Original Message -----
From: "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh_at_aracnet.com>
To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2002 3:48 AM
Subject: Re: SCSI options for PDP 11/23


> >It did have the M8186 11/23 CPU in the 11/03 chassis when I got it, not
> >that that means anything. I did change the memory module to a 128KW
> >MSV11-LK.
>
> My guess is that the chassis has either got a different or upgraded
> backplane. Is there any kind of a number on the backplane itself that you
> can easily see?
>
> OTOH, maybe I'm misremembering and a Q18 CPU will work in a Q16 backplane.
>
> >There's an older Q-bus VAX system at the University that will probably be
> >taken out of service soon, and there's a chance I can grab its SCSI
> >controller (I'm not sure exactly what it has, but I know it has one).
>
> Hopefully it's a CMD controller.
>
> >Its kind of hard to explain, but I'll try. I work for a university on a
>
> Actually it makes perfect sense.
>
> >to be corrected. Lacking the funding to develop something new, combined
> >with everyone assuming I wouldn't be able to revive this system, I
decided
> >to rebuilt it on my own. (We only had a few pieces of the original
system
> >that attached to the DMA and PIO interfaces, which didn't work, and none
> >of the PDP equipment). It was working pretty well until the RX02
>
> Are you using specific Q-Bus boards to interface with the equipment. This
> could be a problem if you decided to try and move to a Q22 system.
>
> >incident. I was hoping I could scrape up a SCSI controller from
somewhere
> >around the university, so I could have a longer-term storage option. So
> >in the next couple of months, it will get used for a "production"
purpose,
> >but then it won't be needed for quite awhile.
>
> Something else you might want to look for is an ESDI controller. It would
> allow you to use slightly more reliable disks, though SCSI is the best.
> The important thing is to stay away from MFM disks!
>
> Zane
> --
> | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
> | healyzh_at_aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
> | | Classic Computer Collector |
> +----------------------------------+----------------------------+
> | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
> | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
> | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
>
Received on Thu Feb 28 2002 - 23:36:58 GMT

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