9 Mar
2007
9 Mar
'07
10:21 p.m.
Ethan Dicks wrote:
I almost had an 11/750 land on me, but I was able to coax it out of
the side door of a Chevy Astro mini-Van (alone) without getting
squished or pinched. That was a fun experience.
I once (with the help of a bunch of other people) was attempting to
unload a DECsystem 5810 (a VAX 6000-300, except with MIPS CPUs -- I got
the machine from Dave McGuire the first time I met him, and I still have
it) from a rental truck down the ramp and it started to tip off the side
of the ramp towards me. I wasn't standing at the time. It landed on me
as I was kneeling down. I caught it.
Now it may seem that sounds implausibly superhuman, but I'd probably
qualify it as thoroughly stupid. You see, I held it up only for a split
second. If it had been another split second, it would have crushed me
dead. No more Sridhar. The people helping me reacted quickly and got
it tilted back up before my strength gave out, which, obviously, it was
about to.
In any case, I felt *sore* the next day. Especially my neck.
I think a 11/750 makes a fine single-user VMS
"workstation" ;-)
Never trust a workstation that couldn't roll over you and smash you flat? Thinking about the whole "11/750
workstation" concept - I wonder if
one could take a qbus mono framebuffer and hang it off of some flavor
of Qniverter? It'd be glacial compared to a real VAXstation II or
VAXstation 2000, but presuming the framebuffer doesn't depend on
anything peculiar to POST on a MicroVAX II, it'd be slick to see. For
"real" work on an 11/750, any flavor of DMA-capable Unibus comms
interface (DEC DMF-32, Emulex CS21...) and an authentic
ANSI-compatible dumb terminal (VT100, VT220...) is just fine (but back
in the day, the "power users" had two terminals on their desk, along
with a serial switch box to manage "multiple sessions" in hardware).
I once asked a question as to whether it would be possible to build a
VAX 6000-based workstation by hanging a Qbus framebuffer from a Unibux
slot hooked to a VAXBI bridge in a VAXBI slot in a secondary BI cage
hooked to a VAX 6000 through an XMI->VAXBI bridge. The consensus was
that it probably wouldn't work. 8-)
I'm going to try anyway. I just haven't had the time.
Peace... Sridhar