On 5/21/07, Gooijen, Henk <henk.gooijen at oce.com> wrote:
Ian wrote:
> I assume that the machine needs to boot initally from TU58
> every time, and then after that, it can bootstrap from disk
> or tape. I found the 11/750 FAQ, but it doesn't have a
> section for "I dragged home a big heavy Vax, now what?".
Once you have decided it's safe to power on and all of that, the first
thing I'd do is to determine what boot PROMs you have (D, I think was
typically TU58), and see what's easy to boot from. If your machine
had a UDA50 on it, there's probably a DU boot PROM which will also
boot, ISTR, an RUX50 (yes... you could stick floppies on an 11/750 -
we did it to be able to cut diskettes for our customers - I think it
was a very expensive option at the time).
To load any OS onto a blank 11/750, you'll need images/tapes with the
standalone restore program for that version of the OS... they changed
on a frequent basis. I won't say it's impossible to do it with the
wrong one, but it's easier all around if you match the versions up.
I really liked working with the 11/750. I used one every day for most
of the time between 1984 and 1993, and did all of the hardware upkeep
on it for the last few years it was installed. As a college boy/punk
kid, I installed the 2MB to 8MB myself (we decided not to drop the
money on upgrading it above 8MB). It was OK for 20-50 users with 8MB,
but we mostly ran MAIL, MASS-11 (word processing), and compiled C
programs with it. Oh, yeah... lots of EMPIRE. Had to keep EMPIRE on
it for the boss ;-)
AFAIK, only the VAX-11/730 needed the TU58 to boot.
Yes, mostly (as in, yes, the 11/730 needs it, and mostly, the 11/750
does not need it).
I heard the boot tape loaded the microcode.
For the 11/730 (and 11/725), yes, the microcode comes off the TU58
every time you power up. Once the microcode is loaded, you can boot
without a tape mounted, but in practice, folks just left their boot
tapes mounted.
For the 11/750, the only time we ever used the console TU58 was when
we were installing a new OS from scratch and had to load the
Standalone Backup tapes (or the equivalent for Ultrix or BSD), or
after a certain point in our VMS usage when it was recommended (but
not absolutely essential) to load a microcode patch when we powered
up. Considering that machine stayed up for months between power
cycles (and weeks between reboots), it didn't happen very often.
An unpatched 11/750 should load VMS < 4.4 just fine (but check the
SPRs). After that is when I get a little fuzzy. We never experienced
any strange machine checks, but our FSE recommended we patch our
microcode (recommended as in "this has to be loaded for me to work on
the machine") I don't think we bothered to load the microcode patch
when we swapped over to Ultrix 1.1 or 2.0 on it. We ran 4.0BSD and
4.1BSD on that same machine years before that patch came out, so it
wasn't an issue.
The VAX-11/750 (I have one) can
boot from any device available in hardware, that is any UNIBUS
peripheral.
Not just UNIBUS - MASSBUS, too. There's a DR boot PROM out there - we
used it to boot our SI9900 w/160MB Fujitsu that emulated 2x RM03.
In line with the "heavy" stuff, the UDA50
with RAxx
drives are nice, but very power-hungry and really heavy. The
newer RA drives are not that power hungry, have more capacity,
but are still heavy, although easier to carry :-)
The RA70 series are hardly power-hungry, but are a bit thin on the
ground. I have a couple of RA70s that some day I'd like to mount
inside one of my 11/750s so I can have an in-cabinet machine. Of
course what I'd _really_ like is a Unibus SCSI controller, but those
are a bit rare.
There's also the option of 3rd-party SDI drives. I've posted about
this one before, but I have a 5.25"-tall rackable disk box 1/2
populated with one SDI bridge board and two 600MB ESDI drives.
Compared to the power draw of an RA81, this is a pittance (5.25" FH
drives are on average, what, 50W? 60W?), and 3 times the capacity.
-ethan