Re: MicroVAX 3500 questions

On Fri, 16 May 2008 07:04:04 -0700 (PDT), ChrisKalisiak
<kalisiak@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Welcome to the VAXen world!

The battery thing has already been touched on, but I'll just add that
I removed the battery from my systems, as they've long since dried
up.

The panel of 4-pin connectors is "SDI", which lets you attach external
RA8x/RA9x drives. Those drives are rare as hen's teeth at this point
(I have had an eBay search watching for an RA8x within 150 miles of me
for over a year, and none have come up), and, to put the final nail in
the SDI coffin, you don't have the KDA50 to go with them. According to
the list of boards in your system, someone removed the KDA50 (which
was two boards) and probably replaced the board set with the two grant
cards.

(The 3500 didn't ship with an RA8x on top; that's what a 3600 is. The
3300 and 3400 did ship with DSSI built-in; I have a MicroVAX 3300
that's been converted to a PDP-11 using a KFQSA DSSI card.)

The grant card in 8CD doesn't make sense at all, altough I guess it
does hold up the other card in slot 8. There are inserts that are
designed specifically for that purpose, but knowing how cobbled
together your system looks, I'm guessing the previous owner just
didn't have some of those inserts.

The DHV11 in 9CD looks to me like the previous owner just had a bunch
of cards and wanted to fill the backplane. I can relate; I have a
MicroVAX 3/GPX in a BA123, and I filled just about every slot in the
backplane with something. But in a BA213, the CD doesn't do anything
except provide power (and has some data lines in the first few slots
that are used by the CPU and memory to speed up memory accesses), so
that second DHV isn't doing any good. Not that a DHV is really all
that useful in the first place, unless you have a lot of serial
devices -- DHV11 is the model number of DEC's 8-port RS232 serial
card. I think the ports were buffered, from what I recall, so the
DHV11 was a more appropriate choice for telephony applications, but
none of that is really relevant anymore.

I wouldn't pay any attention to the stickers anymore, especially
knowing how much the system has been rearranged. The stickers indicate
what the original configuration was when it was shipped from DEC.

The CQD cards are actually quite a find. Those two boards alone are
worth the price of admission. The CQD-220's are SCSI cards. The "M"
means that it's MSCP, which means it supports disks. The "TM" means it
does both MSCP and TMSCP, so that's a universal card that supports
both disks and tapes.

Don't pay any attention to the M7620, since that's just what the
person had available. The M7626 on the board actually indicates that
it's a KA660, which is a VAX 4000/200 CPU. Not bad! That's the fastest
CPU you can install in a BA213, without going through the forklift-
upgrade to move up to a 4000/300 or newer. The 4000/200 is 5 VUP,
whereas the 3500 the system was originally configured as was a 2.7 VUP
system.


Ah, yes, the now nearly useless system configuration details that I
can recall from memory at will... Oh well, at least it helps someone
on occasion. ;-)

Hi,
I do have one of those blank plastic cards installed in 7CD - I guess
others may have been kept by the original owner along with any disks
and the controller. The machine came from HortResearch (formerly a
part of the New Zealand Department of Scientific and Industrial
Research) so they probably removed the disks before getting rid of the
machine years ago for data security reasons.

It looks as if the DHV cards are probably fairly useless as I dont
have what ever cable used to plug into the big connector on the top
edge of the card. I have a DECserver 100 so I suppose I could just use
that if I ever needed to attach a bunch of serial terminals to the
machine.

After another look at my images it looks as if I misread the 5 as
being a 6 making it actually an M7625. According to the QBus field
guide that makes it a KA655-BA (workstation license). I assume the
hobbyist licenses for VMS dont take any notice of the workstation bit.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: MicroVAX 3500 questions
    ... It's an inconvenience but the system will boot without it. ... etc are disks ... Ive put some images of the four ports, label and cards on google: ... 1* DELQA Ethernet controller ...
    (comp.sys.dec)
  • Re: building on your own a large data storage ...
    ... AFAIK you could maximally use 4 hard drives in such boxes ... I have a fileserver with Linux software RAID and 12 disks. ... Wouldn't it be faster/better using extra ATA PCI cards? ...
    (comp.os.linux.hardware)
  • Re: Problems with Adaptec SCSI-cards
    ... And they find the disks correctly, ... So obviously the cards work. ... You mean you are using an LVD cable? ... We have *several* machines with Adaptec 2940-ish controllers at UMass, ...
    (comp.os.linux.misc)
  • Re: [opensuse] boot after installation problem
    ... many raid disk controllers and disks. ... I'm running several dozen servers with 3ware cards, ... When the installation system is probing for hardware, ...
    (SuSE)
  • SCSI device order changed
    ... My machine has two SCSI adapters, one of which always has some disks ... Hard disks are sda thru sdd, ... cards on the PCI bus and be done with it. ...
    (Linux-Kernel)