5 Feb
2015
5 Feb
'15
6:32 a.m.
I've been reading through the 11/45 manuals and it seems these machines
are far more complex than I had imagined. Can anyone understand and
explain the unibus a / unibus b concept?
Should I eliminate all this fancy bipolar and core memory and just use an
m7891? If I did, would it be on the fastbus, unibus a or unibus b and
would it even matter?
On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 2:45 AM, Paul Anderson <useddec at gmail.com> wrote:
You mentioned a G401, which I think is bipolar memory.
There could be 4 of
these and 2 control boards. These are not needed and you might want to pull
them to make trouble shooting easier.
Also I would be careful with them. They used to be expensive if you needed
to replace them.
The 45 and 70 share some boards, and there are 2 different backplanes/
board sets for each.
It sounds like you have the power supplies covered.
On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 12:43 PM, Jacob Ritorto <jacob.ritorto at gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi,
Having gotten the 11/34 rig up to a good spec, I'm sufficiently excited
to tackle the 11/45. It's been powered off since 2004, when I briefly
turned it on only to find a wild jumble of lights and that none of the
front panel switches or knobs did anything to the lights. Couldn't get
it
to run or deposit values or *anything*. I
therefore assumed it was badly
broken and so left it until now. It has stayed perfectly high and dry
but
has gone to extremes in temperature as the
storage isn't climate
controlled
(this is in western Pennsylvania). And
there's a lot of dust.
I'm not going for museum perfection, but want it to be very presentable
(lobbying to keep it as my 'art' in the living room long term if it's
presentable enough :) and functional.
So I'm looking for tips on how to go about it? I was thinking:
1) Truck machine to living room, note positions of all wires / boards.
Photograph, remove and clean dust from them. Place on antistatic bench.
2) Thoroughly blow out dust and debris, vacuum backplane and wipe down
chassis and wires with damp cloth.
3) Map out desired hardware config: I have available two Fujitsu 160
disks,
three Fujitsu M2333K disks and two Fujitsu M2372K
disks. I need to
decide
how to rack and cable at least two, possibly up
to four of them as the 8"
ones have no mounting hardware. Operational status on all is
"hopeful."
I
have two Emulex SC21s and an SC41 as well as an
unmarked Xylogics Unibus
SMD board. I'm also tempted to mount an RX02 drive as I have a
controller
and quite a mountain of floppies supposedly
containing weird old stuff.
I
need to source an ethernet board and whatever
cabling / bulkhead stuff
follows. DZ11, its dist panel and a Diablo 630 printer would be nice,
too.
4) This would also be a good time to broach the subject of whether or not
the capacitors need special love, or if that just adds more risk of
destroying something. Those familiar, please chime in as the archive is
currently missing so I can't refer to the recent threads on this subject.
Datapoint: I didn't mess at all with power supply / caps on my 11/34,
which
was stored right beside the '45 for the same
timespan and it's running
great now. Datapoint 2: with my amateur electronics skills / status,
there's admittedly some risk just having me poking around in there,
"learning" things :-\ Plus, I'm afraid of death from esoteric high
voltages that I hear are present in these old power supplies. Is the
11/45
one of them? In a nutshell, this analog / power
stuff is FAR FROM my
forte; some hand-holding here would be most appreciated.
5) Insert an expendable Unibus module and power up; check & tune power.
I
need direction on how to go about this. Also,
the bottom H742A power
chassis isn't completely populated. Not sure if that's acceptable, on
purpose or bad.
6) Reassemble, tidying up issues like missing / loose screws, rubbing
cables, etc. along the way.
7) rt, 2.11BSD, rsx, rsts/e! (mostly via vtserver - I have a tu10
that I
could get in on this deal, but its roller rubber
has turned into goo and
two cabinets in the living room is more than "pushing it." Later date on
that puppy. )
Current module config starting from front of cabinet (yes, there are some
gaps and M9200 jumpers I don't mention, too):
M9301 + M787
M8114
M8115
M8112
M8113
M8100
M8101
M8102
M8103
M8104
M8105
M8106
M8108
M8107
M8109
M8110
g401
M7800 + M9200 jumper
H214
G231
G110
H214
G231
G110
H214
G231
G110
Unibus cable runs out to third party external memory chassis, "Monolithic
Systems Corp" Type MO v11/PDP11 P/N 300-0058-000, which is three quarters
populated. If this memory is broken, I'm planning to use an M7891
instead
(is that OK?).
No Unibus termination after that. Is that weird / bad?
Does this current config seem sound? Is there a problem obvious just
from
this description that would account for the
unresponsive front panel?
Here's the power supply situation: There are two H742A power chassis.
Top
contains h744, h744, h744, h744, h745. Bottom
contains H745, H746, open,
H744, open.
big thx!
jake