12 May
2016
12 May
'16
11:54 a.m.
On 12/05/2016 00:17, "Antonio Carlini" <a.carlini at ntlworld.com> wrote:
On 12/05/16 00:05, Adrian Graham wrote:
OK, the mists of time are clearing, there was definite a cabinet swap at one
point and I can recall wheeling some smaller cabs out into the warehouse
because they'd been replaced by the 85xx cabs. The smaller ones hadn't
lasted very long IIRC. This was the reason for the 85xx being threatened
with removal, along with the blinkenlights.
My memory's getting skewed with age, clearly. I can remember RKG's (Royal
Kingdom of Geordies) finest 2 engineers upgrading the 8350s to 8550s and the
passage of time has me convinced it was 'only' a backplane swap. I was
purely a code monkey back then. One thing that definitely happened was the
MD of this company was going to have his new VAXen removed again because
they didn't have blinkenlights.
The VAX 8200/8250/8300/8350 was a low-end BI-based system.
Put in one CPU and you had a VAX 8200; put in two and you had a VAX8300.
There was a mid-life kicker, which was a slightly faster CPU and that
gave you
the 8250/8350. I'm sure I put three CPUs in the one I had back at DEC and
it booted and (this is where I'm hazy) called itself a VAX 8370 VAX 8530 iirc. The VAX 8550 was the faster variant in
the same box.
These systems
had a PRO variant for the console. They all used the NMI backplane and
so were
similar to (but not iirc upgradeable to) the VAX 88x0 series ("Polarstar").
Gotcha.
These were all much taller boxes than the VAX 8200 series.
BTW: well done for remembering RKG :-)
My second home for a long while and I'm still friends with the engineers,
Allan, Aiden, Alan, Mike, John etc. We had ales aplenty last year :)
--
Adrian/Witchy
Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator
Www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UK's biggest private home computer
collection?