VAX 9440

Evan said it was in service until a couple of months ago, so it should power up OK, if it could all be electrically and mechanically stitched back together carefully. The question is probably, could they afford the power bill? We have a bunch of Crays and CDCs at the Computer History Museum, and if they were operational, we'd probably have to take up a special very-large-hat-passing collection just to pay the power bill for the multiple,- multi-ton refrigeration units (at least one was about a seven-ton unit, IIRC)! Then, there's the problem of replacement parts for when, not if, things fail, not to mention the labor expertise and availability. It's one thing to replace discrete transistors in our IBM 1401, but, it's quite another to desolder and yank various little black rectangles off extremely dense circuit boards without destroying anything else ... and then solder in a replacement, if you can find one not already firmly attached to another board with another kind of failure. That assumes that problems can even be isolated, although at least more modern systems tend to have self-diagnostic capabilities, at least above a certain level of functionality, or lack thereof. On Sat, Nov 10, 2018 at 3:26 AM Pontus Pihlgren via cctalk < cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E-Q5xrsYXyjrZEZh92xIBhlStvvNUcRV/view?usp=… https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bEpSMzBEeOvuDnzPQ9Npc7iYmDhjZq8c/view?usp=…