All the VAX talk has me wanting my VAXen back :(

On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 9:32 AM, Gene Buckle <geneb at deltasoft.com> wrote: Yes. The 8200 and 8250 have one CPU, the 8300 and 8350 have two. Unlike later models, these CPUs sit right on the VAXBI bus. When these machines came out, DEC provided the most obvious native peripherals (KDB50 disk, DEBNI ethernet, DMB32 serial mux, CI interface, etc) but there were so many oddball Unibus cards out there (including the ones we sold) that another peripheral was the DWBUA BI-to-Unibus adapter. Some models were ordered and shipped with one BI section and one DD11DK and a DWBUA with short cables in the BA32 chassis, but what we had was the more common version - two BI sections in the main BA32 and long cables over to a BA11 in the next rack over. In my case, it was all working in its former home, but something happened to it when I moved it and the DWBUA has never worked since. The BI portion all works - memory, disk, dual CPUs, etc., but the amber LED on the DWBUA card stays off and the Unibus isn't seen by VMS. I have the maintenance manual for the DWBUA - I've been through the register poking at the chevron prompt - it appears to be a failure of one of the many tests the DWBUA performs before coming online of a kind where it is reporting some not-as-well-documented fault with the UET module on the far end of the Unibus. I could be having a cable fault, a card fault, or a backplane fault. In the end, the DWBUA performs some reads and writes and is not getting the answers it's looking for. I have more than one UET module - ISTR different ones give me different results from the DWBUA self-test, so I'm willing to entertain one or more are broken. What would help is being able to test and repair a UET in some other box, but that's a poorly documented module. Here's a thread from a couple of years back with some detail... http://www.classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctech/2009-April/064428.html -ethan