The DEC M9060 board

The visual field guide lists it as ??? many other field guides don't list it at all. It was the answer to question I didn't know to ask. Its a friggin' dummy load! If you happen to come across a DEC "skunk box" also know as the BA213 chassis which was home to MicroVAX 3300 - 3900's and some DEC System 5500's, you'll notice it has two power supplies (one on the left and one on the right). I was restoring a MicroVAX 3400 and thought it had a "bad" power supply. As it turned out, without sufficient load these power supplys will not "light up." So to fix that on the 3400 I plugged a Fujitsu SCSI drive (known power hog :-) on to the disk connector and voila, the thing worked. So I've been looking at a couple of 3400's that were used as a cluster and both of them had M9060 boards installed in the last slot. These boards provide sufficent load on the supplies to get them to both turn on. _Very_ handy gizmos. Moral of the story, if you think you have a "bad" BA213 chassis, try loading up the power supply a bit, and if that works, find one of these boards and plug it into the last slot! Another of lifes little mysteries solved. --Chuck