FWIW, (To restart a old thread)
I stumbled across this website.
It appears the "upgradable" VAX-4300 backplane is part #54-19354-01
(As printed on the little sticker next to the right most Q-bus(?)
slot)
No serial numbers involved, but you do have to open it up. :->
Finally getting around to cleaning the VAX. The dust isn't too
bad. Nicely made machine, good steel frame. Backplane is on par w/
my Crimson's backplane. :)
Ciao,
David
On Fri, 24 Dec 2004, Witchy wrote:
with a ribbon cable doing the cpu/memory interconnect
while
the later ones
used the zero-force type white socket blocks found on the likes of the
HSD/HSZ RAID controllers and Alpha 1200 CPU modules.
Are you sure about that? I thouht the only difference was that
more wires were connected on the later backplane. You were
supposed to be able to use anything (including a KA670) in
the later backplanes but only a KA670 in the earlier one.
We've got several 4000 series VAXen in the workshop and one of them has
this backplane, I'm sure it's a 4000-505 or something of that ilk. I'm
back home in Newcastle for the festivities now, but I can mail the poor
saps left at work tomorrow and ask them to check :) I can also check my
own 4500 assuming the wind doesn't stop me getting to the garage tomorrow!
Oh, the levers that hold the boards in are on some sort of ratchet
arrangement from what I remember, it's been a few months since I was last
delving into the internals.
If the difference was physically obvious, why
rely on telling
people the serial number range to distinguish one from another
when simply looking would have done?
because end users weren't allowed to pull their machines apart to check?
Cheers,
--
adrian/witchy
Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator
www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UKs biggest home computer collection?