New VAX 6000 toys.

From: Brian Chase <vaxzilla_at_jarai.org>
Date: Wed Oct 16 13:55:00 2002

On Wed, 16 Oct 2002, Corda Albert J DLVA wrote:

> OK, I finally dug out my DEC systems & options catalogs, and found a
> couple of references to the rack-mount 6000 in the 1990 and 1991
> catalogs. These were originally sold as two 19" rack-mountable
> enclosures, one containing the XMI cardcage, and the other containing
> a BI cardcage. Both enclosures appear very similar, with the main
> difference being that the XMI enclosure has a very small front panel
> on it. The BI enclosure seems to have a cutout on the front panel for
> a TK70 tape drive and _no_ front panel. The earlier catalogs treat the
> 2 cardcages as 1 complete system, while the later catalogs refer to
> the 19" rack BI enclosure as an "option".
>
> Not being greatly familiar with the 6000, am I correct in assuming that
> if you don't have the BI "option" you have not I/O capability whatsoever?
> (except for possibly ethernet? how about SCSI?)

I don't have the BI option, but DEC made plenty of I/O modules for XMI.
They also offered an XMI bus SCSI module, but I've been told that it was
only supported in DEC's OSes on the XMI based Alpha systems. Supported
on the VAX were XMI DSSI and SDI modules for directly attached disk;
I have one of each of these that I got for a full sized VAX 6420 that I
acquired a while back.

Other I/O options are obviously the FDDI network module which supports
100Mb/s data rates. Fortunately, I've got access to a FDDI concentrator
so I can actually make use of this--at least between the two VAX 6000s.
And then there's the CI (Cluster Interconnect or Computer Interconnect
depending on the docs I find) module. I've not had any direct
experience with it yet, though I've found docs which state 8.75MB/s per
path with 17.5MB/s per port. A dual ported controller can support
35MB/s of bandwidth.

I definitely would like to have the VAXBI option for this, but I
couldn't even imagine where to begin to find one. If your catalog
mentions the DEC part numbers for the main VAX 6000 and the VAXBI
options, that would be useful to me. I'd also be very curious to know
which CPU types the catalog mentioned being supported for the later
(1991) rackmount VAX 6000 models. I can certainly live with 6000-400
series CPUs, but it'd be really nice to put some 6000-600 series procs
in these if they support 3.3V power. Vrrrooooom!

-brian.
Received on Wed Oct 16 2002 - 13:55:00 BST