Multi-CPU Qbus VAXen

From: Alex White <meltie_at_meltie.com>
Date: Mon Oct 13 13:30:33 2003

On Monday 13 Oct 2003 6:54 pm, Antonio Carlini wrote:
> > No, just four totally seperate 4-slot Q22 backplanes sharing
> > a common PSU
> > (OK, i'm hardly going for 5x9 uptime and redundancy here!) in
> > a largish
>
> Wouldn't this just be essentially 4 BA23s in a rackmount type
> of enclosure? If so, they would each have their own PSU. I
> don't know about the various configs that DEC sold officially,
> but the ones I put together by scrounging round the lab were
> always stacks of BA23s and a distribution panel of some sort.

Well, i'm looking at what's available to me *now* and that's an old
collector friend of mine with quite a few PDP11 Q18/22 backplanes and
R400X cabs (amongst other things!) who's thinning his collection down
rather drastically...


> > deskside case and clustered over thinwire - was going to look
> > for KA660s
> > so I could share a DSSI disk too. Could multiple hosts use a SCSI bus?
>
> AFAICR the KA660 will happily work in a BA23 but if you want DSSI
> you need the proper cab kit, which needs a BA2xx or BA4xx case.
> So now you are back to back-to-back mounted BA213 or BA430 in a rack.

Whoops, I totally forgot about the magic DSSI backplane >_< thanks for
reminding me!


> > Unfortunately the amount of VAXen (and therefore available
> > CPUs) over here in the UK is a LOT smaller than in the US!
>
> Nah. You just need to look harder, or more likely, for longer. They
> crop up but you have to work at it. There's plenty of stuff on
> reseller's shelves and it will all become available over the next
> ten to twenty years or so as they close up shop or move on to
> other things. The real problem will be what to do when that happens:
> do you save both the VAX 8650 and the VAX 9000 and how can you
> have them both running on the Internet at the same time.
>
> Of course, if you're not in this for the long haul ... :-)

I haul these things around with me from University flat to University flat.
The girlfriend is happy for my collection to grow - she passed me an ebay
UK link to a 6200 a few months or so ago and said that she'd quite like to
have one around *grins*

alex/melt
Received on Mon Oct 13 2003 - 13:30:33 BST