Mark Wendt (Contractor) wrote: > Jon, > > You sure you didn't bring home a Vax workstation? I had a > bunch of those, and they were built in the pizza box config that the > early desktops were like. The Micro-Vax was still a server, though > it was a bit smaller than the 6000 series... > I did, indeed, bring home a MicroVAX-II with no graphics for a couple months. It was smashed by a shipper, and abandoned for months. But, they eventually wanted it back for salvage. I had to buy a KA-630AA CPU board for $6800, certainly the most expensive "toy" I'd ever bought. Back in those days, you could buy an econo car for that price. But, it ran RINGS around the PCs of that day! I also bought a backplane, and a disk controller.
You can see the monstrosity I built in a memory cabinet that was originally attached to an IBM 370-135. This held 1-4 MB of Intersil static RAM. I originally had two MB of the RAM, and was building a 32-bit CPU out of AMD bit slice components. I did have that machine running, but writing the microcode and then an entire OS was looming as a decade-long endeavor. So, when I got the VAX pieces, I decided to put it in this cabinet. http://pico-systems.com/images/VAX.jpg The power supplies are on the left, behind the panel with the lights and switches. You can monitor voltages and temperature and airflow sensors from that panel. To the right are two 9-slot Q-bus backplanes stuffed with boards. the silver boxes below are air plenums with two different fan technologies in them. The CPU (right) has a motorized impeller, with a brushless motor pulled from an 8" floppy drive. The left expansion backplane has a tangential blower. Sticking out of this plenum, you can see one of the airlow sensors. If the fan quits, the system will shut down within 15 seconds. The 5" hard drive is below the power monitor panel. The IBM blue door is seen edge-on at the right. Partly hidden by the door is another rack with an open-reel tape drive (1600/6250 BPI) on the bottom, an ADC rack that monitors the house environmental stuff, and a little bus and backplane of my own design that interfaces the ADC and other stuff. This has all been moved to the PC and Linux, now. So, this system is a BIT bigger than DEC's pizza box systems! Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
