Rescue of a life-time.. or the year at the very least.

So, after forgetting to bid on the 11/780 that was on eBay, ending on Sunday (I slept in 15 minutes too late), I decided to drop the guy a message and see if he had another 11/780. Much to my amazement he did, and when I asked if he had any other DEC equipment, he replied that he had an 11/750 (which it turned out he had two, but I only took one of), and that I should "bring the largest truck I could find, and he'd get me loaded up. So, I spent Sunday night looking at options for rental or borrowed trucks, and times, and decided that it was cheap enough to get a 15' Budget Truck (which was a lot cheaper than what Penske or UHaul wanted for a similar size), and after finding out he'd be leaving Friday for a month, I decided I needed to go get the stuff now. So, I reserved the truck for Tuesday. Having done this "move computer that weighs a lot" thing a few times before, I put together some tools Monday night, 10 or 12 ratchet straps, hard packing foam to keep stuff from scratching too badly, tape for marking things, along with some cardboard boxes, ziploc bags, masking tape and a sharpie and 2 friends (well one was my roommate). We left here at 8am on Tuesday morning, picked up the Truck in Waukesa, WI, around 12:15, and got to the place before 12:30, avoiding too much bad traffic driving through Chicago a bit after morning rush hour. The building the machines have been stored in for the last decade (or more) is an old limestone building in downtown Waukesa, which according to the guy who was trying to clear out the stuff used to be a brewery - fitting for an old building near Milwaukee. : ) Anyhow, the guy is a landlord, and some company was using the building as storage. He said that there used to be a lot more machines there before - some had been scrapped, and he had been able to sell some things using eBay. So, after getting there we loaded up the 11/750, and UNIBUS expansion rack that appeared to go with it, and headed to the "large pile" to look through more things. In that pile were the two 11/780s, another 11/750, a Systems Industries disk rack with some sort of controller, which I'm guessing goes with the VAXen, a 5ft DEC rack with a Cipher tape drive in the top and a UNIBUS box at the bottom. Aparently, attached to all the VAX hardware was some Intergraph and Synercom CAD "workstations", which consisted of an approx. 4x2x3ft (WxDxH) box that contained the "main electronics" with a 4x2 ft digitizing tablet, and two monitors which were 20-24" on top of the main 4x2x3ft box. The Intergraph ones were somewhat plain, with the two monitors in one enclosure, but the Synercom ones had a very "Bat-Cave" feel to them, and were separate monitors on swivel posts. If I had room for one, I would have grabbed one of them. I didn't get a chance to look too closely, or take a picture either, which I do somewhat regret. In the back corner behind that stuff was a CDC 14" disc cartridge drive of some sort (which was rated 1phase, 208VAC.. I didn't have room for it, or disk carts), a Sun 3/180 with a pair of 800MB-ish Fujitsu SMD drives and a Sun-branded 9-track tape drive. The final item I found there was a Data General Eclips MV/4000. It had two 19" rack mount disk drives, which appeared to possibly be SCSI (?), a 9-track drive, and the CPU. So, I managed to bring home one of the 11/750s, its expansion cabinet, one 11/780, the Systems Industries disk rack, the DEC rack with the Cipher drive and UNIBUS box, the Sun 3/180 rack, and the DG Eclipse. All in all, I'd say I made out fairly well. The truck was probably a bit overloaded (I'm certain we had more than 3500lbs of stuff in the truck, which what it's "suggested capacity" was, as the leaf springs on the back tires were arcing upwards slightly, instead of downwards... I'm glad it's a rental. : ) The ride home brought us right through rush-hour traffic on Chicago's loop (I-90/94), and we got back here around 10pm; we left for home around 5pm after some lunch. I spent the next day (Wednesday) working all day, and then came home and unloaded the truck with some help from friends. We removed as much weight as we could from the racks before taking them down the ramp, which was actually wide enough to be of some help, and was strong enough to hold up to the mostly-intact 11/780. I've got a picture of the 11/780 up, with the front doors removed: http://computer-refuge.org/compcollect/dec/vax/11780/vax11780-front-open.jp g I don't yet have pictures of anything else, nor do I have most of it reassembled yet. I spent this afternoon testing the 11/780's power supplies with a dummy load - they all appear to work - and then running a 30A 220V line from where there used to be an electric range in this house to the garage so I can try to power it up. I noticed when I was working on the VAX (I had to look at what cards are in it!) that it has a full complement of 32MB of ram (8 x 4MB boards), made by EMC Corp, along with a memory backplane power supply by EMC and a battery-backup power supply box for the memory, which was the same as what the 11/750 used for its memory backup (the 11/750 I got also had a memory backup battery power supply). I took the batteries out of those, along with the TODC power supply, as I'm quite certain that they need to be replaced. If I can remember, tomorrow I'll be fetching a new battery for the TODC power supply in the 11/780 and fitting that. Tomorrow I'll be finishing that up, wiring up an adaptor so I can plug in the 11/780's PDU (I "fixed" it a bit - moved plugs around - so I can use it with 1-phase 220 instead of 3-phase 208), and potentially re-racking some of the rest of what I have. I hope to have the 11/780 cleaned up and ready to try powering up before the end of the weekend. After that will be the Eclipse, the 11/750, and the Sun 3/180 (in no particular order). As I set up my 11/780, I'm gonna try to put together a page on it like the 11/750 page I have on my site right now, I'll probably do something similar for the Eclipse too once I get that far. One thing I noticed after getting home is that I should have engaged the shipping locks on the disk drives... so I don't know how well they faired, but that'll be something I can worry about later, as it's too late to do anything about it now. In one of the UNIBUS boxes (presumably for the 11/780) I got, there was a Emulex UC18 UNIBUS SCSI card, so if all else fails, I should be able to put some low-power disk drives (even FH 5.25" drives are low power for it! :) on that thing, and I *think* (but am not yet sure because I haven't checked it out) that the Eclipse also uses SCSI disks. I realize how much the UC18 is probably worth, and would consider selling it if I had another form of mass-storage for the 11/780, but I'm not sure I do.... that's something I still have to look into. Since the stuff I got is now blocking my roommate from parking in the garage, I'm gonna have to start purging some of the smaller / less interesting things I've got laying around here, so look out for postings of stuff available from me soon. As well, if you're interested in the Intergraph or Synercom stuff, or those disk drives (sorry I didn't look closely enough for a part #), you might want to look the guy up via the 11/780 auction and send the guy a message. Just remember that someone already has the other 11/780 and 11/750 going to him. :) Pat