On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 10:57 PM, Ethan Dicks <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 9:48 PM, Jon Elson <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 02/08/2016 03:23 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote: > >> > >> I don't know if you could use the 256K boards (populated with 4116s) in > >> the 11/730 due to the tri-voltage 4116s, but even if they worked, you > >> wouldn't want to - 5 of them just isn't that much RAM. > > > > We ran our first 11/780 with 2 memory boards. I THINK we had a total of > 256 > > KB, and one Friday afternoon one of them died and we had to run over the > > weekend with only one board, so that would have been 128 KB. Yes, it > was a > > bit tight on memory, but we got a LOT done on that machine. > > As I mentioned our first 11/750 was delivered with 512KB (we upgraded > it pretty quickly to 8 boards for 2MB, where it ran for years). The > 11/750 first shipped with IIRC VMS 2.0. My first encounters with VMS > was around mid-1984 and VMS 3.4. We had 8MB of memory in our second > 11/750 but it was supporting 50+ users. > > That 11/750 went off-lease, we sent it back. That's why I had to > upgrade the other one, so we'd still have an 8MB VAX in-house. It ran > VMS 4.7 at the end of its days 23 years ago (we had quite a bit of > software that wasn't available for/wasn't licensed for/wasn't under > paid-maintenance for 5.x). I haven't powered it up since we left that > building (I do occasionally power up the 8300 that we got for product > development). > > So I'm fairly confident that 512MB is enough for VMS 2.0 but I _think_ > by 3.0, you had to have a megabyte or two. 1.25MB would be the most > you could stuff in a 11/730 if you could use the boards populated with > 16Kbit DRAMs. I don't think VMS 2.x runs on an 11/730 (but I could be > wrong there). We ran Ultrix 1.1 and VMS 5.0 on one of ours (with > 5MB). VMS 5.0 barely fit - we mostly used that to link our product > binaries under 5.x for distribution to our customers. > > I do know someone in Ohio who ran VMS 5.0 on a VAX-11/725, but they > did it by cutting a slot in the skin and running a BC11 cable out to a > BA11 box next to the 11/725 and stuffing a UDA50 in the BA11. With an > external disk, there's no practical difference between an 11/725 and > an 11/730... same CPU, same backplane, same memory... just a packaging > difference. > > -ethan > I ran my VAX 4000-200 all day today. I have never worked with an older VAX. I run VMS 6.2 Today I booted off the backup drive to keep it fresh, DIA5. I am running MULTINET. 3 M7622 16MB RAM boards installed. :-) -- @ BillDeg: Web: vintagecomputer.net Twitter: @billdeg <https://twitter.com/billdeg> Youtube: @billdeg <https://www.youtube.com/user/billdeg> Unauthorized Bio <http://www.vintagecomputer.net/readme.cfm>
