Vax Station 3100

----- Original Message ----- From: "Neil Cherry" <ncherry(a)home.net> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2000 2:08 AM Subject: Re: Vax Station 3100 archetecture. They and You may have read about the insidious mouse port dependency on these machines :) These systems must have either a mouse or a "mouse port terminator" installed on them to boot NetBSD (and others, perhaps) from the graphics console. I think more information on them can be found on the NetBSD/pmax Web site, or you could also probably look it up by typing something like "DECstation 3100 mouse terminator" into your favorite search engine. I'm not sure if its a problem if you boot the system off a serial console (which, incidentially, you can do; just hook up a terminal to the port with the printer icon next to it and flip the little DIP switch S3 on the back of the system - then you don't even need a mouse, keyboard, or monitor). Unfortunately, unless you have a MMJ terminal (VT3/400 series) you'll need to either buy or build a converter to break out MMJ to something more useful. The only problem is that (out here, at least), MMJ plugs are just about impossible to find and the converters (MMJ->DB25) cost $25 from DEC. Ouch! Don't get rid of it though! These are great little machines for light network serving using something like NetBSD (which runs on them well; http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/pmax). I've got one in my basement with 24Mb RAM, color framebuffer to a VR290 monitor, and RZ23 and RZ24 hard disks in it. It works like a charm! --Sean Caron (root(a)diablonet.net) | http://www.diablonet.net