17 Sep
2026
17 Sep
'26
3:54 a.m.
I took a chance and bought an Alphastation DS10L recently sold as
untested. (1U model).
On receipt it boots a virgin VMS 7.2b with everything under the sun
installed and licensed to 'dec internal'. If I enter a date later than
2002 or so, the installed software explodes with license expiration.
The list of installed features takes forever to list at 9600baud.....
I searched the drive for boot logs etc and all are blank.
The drive reports zero gigs read and the entire machine is utterly
pristine within, dustless.
The seller did not install vms on this drive. I checked the date-codes
on both drive and machine; they are contempories. I'm very confident
that this drive shipped with the machine, and it bears no sign of use.
I imaged the drive (for fun with my PA7300lc), so I have a secured copy
of the drive with the only difference that it has been booted once or
twice, and on the last I changed the SYSTEM password to "slateev6".
Is this installation of interest? There's a paper tag on the machine
which still reads "TP 14" in ballpoint. Is this possibly an internal
machine? There are no asset tags on it.
best,
jeff
(Technoid Mutant)