> Thanks for the info. It turns out that it has the DSSI ->
> SCSI option. I
That probably means an XMI DSSI adapter (KFMSA) and an HSD
controller (or controllers) that do the DSSI<->SCSI part.
> don't know what kind of drives are in the second cabinet though. I'm
> wondering if it would be possible to add more cpu boards to
> this beast...
You can have up to 6 cpus in there (that would be a
VAX 6000-660): the limitation (other than finding the
CPU boards) will be how many slots are free. That will
probably depend on which memory boards you have. 384MB
suggests 1x256MB + 1x128MB or 3x128MB. My recollection
is that this class of machine benefits from memory
interleave, so 2N memory boards of the same type is
generally better.
You can get up to 1GB in the machine, but to have
support for that you will need OpenVMS V6.0 or later.
Minimum OS support is V5.5 but you should be able to get
hobbyist licences and media from montagar.com easily
enough. (Or maybe someone here can supply the media
as an ISO or whatever). I'd suggest that you lean towards
OpenVMS V7.2 or V7.3 to start with - V5.5 is old enough
that help may be a little harder to come by (in particular,
remembering "gotchas" from that far back can be challenging!).
You mentioned a DEBNI (or DEBNA or DEBNT). I forget the
differences between all these boards (i.e. which were
the worst, which differ only in microcode and which
support a tape) but a DEMNA (XMI ethernet) would be
the ideal (at the expense of an XMI slot though).
Having said that, at 10Mbps, it probably makes little
difference. (Except the DEMNA was probably less buggy
than the others!)
There is much VAX 6000 family information on the
net. "VAX 6000" fed into
http://vt100.net/manx/
should provide plenty of reading for a while.
One last point, you can (should you wish to for fun)
probably get older VAX 6000 series boards running
in that chassis. The procedure is described in
the various upgrade manuals (although you would
be going the other way!)
Antonio
--
---------------
Antonio Carlini arcarlini_at_iee.org
Received on Tue Oct 12 2004 - 17:00:14 BST