On 5/21/07, Gooijen, Henk <henk.gooijen at oce.com> wrote:
This weekend I think I will buy the L0022 memory
controller plus
two M7199 (4Mb) memory boards to replace the other controller and
1 Mb memory boards. Got 6 of those, so after the memory upgrade
I will have two spare 1 Mb boards ... have not decided yet *if*
I will spend the $100 for the three boards, or just keep the 6 Mb
that are installed now.
If I were trying to use a 11/750 for anything intense, I'd seriously
consider upgrading it to 14MB, but for a low number of users (1?) 8MB
goes a long way.
Oh, yeah...
lots of EMPIRE. Had to keep EMPIRE on it for the
boss ;-)
What's EMPIRE? A game?
Would be a nice reason to fire up the VAX more often :-)
EMPIRE is one of the best VMS games ever. It's you vs the computer
in a land, air, sea battle for a continent and/or a few islands. You
build up armies, march across the land, and conquer neutral or
enemy-occupied cities. Unless you demand total annihilation, I
recommend accepting the computer's surrender - IMO, if you get him
backed that far into a corner, you are only about 50% of the way to
tracking down his last man and killing it. You'll win, but it will
take a long time to find his last few units.
It's a bit like Civilization without the unrest and the wonders of the
world, etc... just military units. Plays great on an 11/750 and
VT100.
True. As with the L0022/M7199, I can get an L0007
MASSBUS interface
for $40. It is just a nice to have ... although I have two RM03's,
I don't think I will connect them to the VAX. I intend to connect
them to the PDP-11/70, but never say never ...
Does that $40 include the cab kit?
If you want to run large pedestal drives on your VAX, the RM03 isn't a
bad one to use, but the MB/KhW ratio is a bit low.
The good news is that if you have a few packs, you could use the RM03s
with _either_ the VAX or your 11/70, just move the cables and swap the
packs.
I could say "me too", but OTOH, a VAX with
RA81's does look nice
or at least impressive :-)
The first RA81 I ever saw was on an 11/750. It was pretty fresh when
I started working at that place - they'd just dropped $26,000 on the
drive. I still have it. It still works (or at least the last time I
spun it up, it did).
There's nothing inherently "wrong" with an RA81 (except for the ones
with bad glue ;-), but at 1000W for 450MB, I'd rather have a smaller
drive and spend the electricity budget on the CPU. If you _really_
want the 11/750 experience, though, I gotta recommend MASSBUS disks.
We booted ours from the SI9900, and had a Fuji Eagle and an RA81 for
data disks - nearly a Gig between 3 spindles in 1988!
-ethan