a VAX 11/780 in my garage ...

Hi I am happy to announce my new baby: thanks to Jon Auringer of Astronautics and Merle Pierce of RICM, I have now a VAX 11/780 in my garage. Nice cabinet, with UNIBUS extension and a TE16 drive (looks nice but will I ever sacrifice a 25A circuit just for it?). Inside the VAX are KA780, UBA, MS780 (8 MB) and 2 MBAs. In the UNIBUS cabinet are two DZ-11, an INTERLAN BD-NI 1010, an M8716 (general purpose parallel), and a "CBV inc" (?) "MODEL-215 DMA Option" (two 4-wide boards with additional cable between them, to a 3-row D connector that looks a bit like my KLESI connector ... any idea what that might be?). More UNIBUS stuff: Datasystems LP 11/32 (parallel printer) a few grants (I need to learn UNIBUSology to understand how this can work.) I have spare DZ-11, just in case someone is in need. The last board is a 919 UNIBUS connector with long cable connecting into another drawer. That one is a backplane of unknown nature. It has one card to play the UNIBUS adapter, then a whole bunch of MEGATEK cards all together making up a frame-buffer and digitizer assembly that was used for a SCICARDS circuit layout system. Any shred of information about this would be appreciated. I don't think its UNIBUS or QBUS (no grants between the two clusters of cards.) Now, since I want to use this VAX to upgrade to an 11/785, I still need a KA785 CPU backplane. The worst beaten-up machine that you see in your neighbor's dumpster will do for screwing those pieces off. Unfortunately they are all too often forgotten. But I will first go with the 11/780 setup to gain the feeling for this class of machine. I have some documentation and probably a full set of diagnostics floppies. If anyone needs, I'll be happy to help out ... of course I first need to get the machine going to read the floppies. I am looking for info on the CI installation. I have the CI boards but no clue about cab-kit stuff. Was hoping to use parts of the CIBCA cab kit stuff to build one. I am also looking for a source of FP780 boards, mine had no floating poing option installed. I have the additional PSU, but no cabling for the PSU to the backplane and of course no FP780 cards. (I have FP785 cards, but they don't mix.) Finally I'm contemplating to build a dual processor machine if I can gather the parts for it. All I need is a CPU extension cabinet, a second KA780 or 785 CPU set and bits and pieces from other VAX 11/78x backplanes (SBI cabling, mounting stuff etc.) Apparently the Purdue guys have done that very successfully in 1981, and the only reason this wasn't an SMP setup appears to be that 4.1 BSD didn't do SMP. I would imagine that one could hack NetBSD to run a dual 11/78x. (That's not an 11/782 or /787, DEC did that differently.) So, if you have a spare extension cabinet, backplane, CPU boards, PSUs, card cage, card rails, cables, even the meanest nag, let me know. I am slowly switching from an ackquisition frenzie to maintenance mode. I seem to have most of what I can reasonably want and fit into my house. Now it's time to get it all going well. If I have things running by Summer, I'm thinking of throwing a VAX-Party. But it may take me until next year. I have given my 6000-520 and second SA600 and second HSC90 to Merle from RICM. I still have a TU81PLUS and a Dataproducts printer to give away. Probably also two terminals (VT 420 or so). regards, -Gunther -- Gunther Schadow, M.D., Ph.D. gschadow(a)regenstrief.org Medical Information Scientist Regenstrief Institute for Health Care Adjunct Assistant Professor Indiana University School of Medicine tel:1(317)630-7960 http://aurora.regenstrief.org