On Jan 1,
2022, at 1:12 PM, Noel Chiappa via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
This:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/275084268137
The starting price is expensive, but probably not utterly unreasonable,
given that:
- the 780 was the first VAX, and thus historically important
- 780's are incredibly rare; this is the first one I recall seeing for sale
in the classic computer era (versus several -11/70's, /40s, etc)
- this one appears to be reasonably complete; no idea if all the key CPU
boards are included, but it's things like the backplane, etc (all of which
seem to be there) which would be completely impossible to find now - if any
boards _are_ missing, there's at least the _hope_ that they can be located
(780 boards seem to come by every so often on eBait), since people seem to
keep boards, not realizing that without the other bits they are useless
Interesting, but the argument for why it's not tested is implausible which makes me
very suspicious. I suppose there might be a few American homes that have only 110 volt
power, but I'm hard pressed to think of any I have ever seen, and that includes really
old houses.