7 Jul
1998
7 Jul
'98
10:48 a.m.
Hi folks,
Still busy rummaging through the truckload of PDPs and VAXen and
peripherals and manuals, etc.
I'm looking for any info sources to learn more about a VAX 11/730. FAQs are
what I need. Web searches using Metacrawler and DejaNews yield rather
meager results. Sites like the excellent PDP site:
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/academic/computer-science/history/pdp-11/ are
what I really would like to find.
I know I have probably found a good home for the 11/750 but I am
considering keeping the 730. First I need to do a heap of studying to check
the completeness of the box and to more fully understand what peripherals
and accessories I that should keep (which are already setting in the
garage) or to search for.
Could any of you folks help point me in the proper directions?
Thanks for all your help and support so far.
--Chris
-- --
Christian Fandt, Electronic/Electrical Historian
Jamestown, NY USA
Member of Antique Wireless Association
URL: http://www.ggw.org/freenet/a/awa/
7 Jul
7 Jul
12:53 p.m.
I'm looking for any info sources to learn more
about a VAX 11/730. FAQs are
what I need. Web searches using Metacrawler and DejaNews yield rather
meager results. Sites like the excellent PDP site:
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/academic/computer-science/history/pdp-11/ are
what I really would like to find.
I know I have probably found a good home for the 11/750 but I am
considering keeping the 730. First I need to do a heap of studying to check
the completeness of the box and to more fully understand what peripherals
and accessories I that should keep (which are already setting in the
garage) or to search for.
I don't know what variety you got, but the R80 (RB80) in the rack with some
VAX-11/730's is a cheap and easy disk to use. Slow, but supported. I
have one in storage. The 11/730 is the slowest UNIBUS machine made (along
with the 11/725, same CPU, different box), .3 to .4 VUPs (the 11/780 and
MicroVAX II are the benchmark, about 1 VUP). You can't officially extend the
UNIBUS, but unofficially, I have attached a BA11 to a 730. It works, but
there are no shielded cables to stay FCC compliant with.
It has a max of 5Mb. It'll run VMS4.x OK, 5.x is *slow*. You *need* a
cassette in the internal (around the side) TU58 slot. There is an 8085
boot processor on a CPU board. It reads the tape and stuffs microcode
onto another CPU board. I have on a disk somewhere, not readily accessible,
a program to optimize that tape (speeds booting from 20 minutes to 5).
It will also run Ultrix (BSD UNIX). I recommend an old version, say, 1.1.
A stock 11/730 should have a DMF32 for serial and parallel. It is possible
to wire up a box to adapt the 37 pin parallel port to a centronics printer,
but you'll need a 7404 inverter to flip some control lines. It's not just
wires.
We always used a tu80 on our 11/730. There are other drives you can use,
but that was the cheapest way for us to go.
Good luck. It's a VAX, but the doggiest VAX there is. At least it sucks
less than 15 amps.
-ethan
2:22 p.m.
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8 Jul
8 Jul
2:12 a.m.
I don't know how 'official' it is, but my
11/730 came with a BA11-K, a
sheilded cable with 3 header sockets on each end, a set of cabinet kits
to plug it into, and the associated internal cables/paddleboards. I
believe it is an official setup, and I think I have the DEC installation
instructions for it somewhere.
Wow! When I was using a production 11/730, we _never_ had anything that
fancy. We just strung the tape cable out of the side.
Good luck.
It's a VAX, but the doggiest VAX there is. At least it sucks
less than 15 amps.
It's also one of the 2 VAXen (The other being the 11/780) that's almost
all standard components, so it can be repaired and kept running. And I
don't have space for an 11/780...
9:05 a.m.
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5:12 a.m.
Ethan Dicks wrote:
I don't know what variety you got, but the R80
(RB80) in the rack with some
VAX-11/730's is a cheap and easy disk to use. Slow, but supported. I
have one in storage. The 11/730 is the slowest UNIBUS machine made (along
with the 11/725, same CPU, different box), .3 to .4 VUPs (the 11/780 and
MicroVAX II are the benchmark, about 1 VUP). You can't officially extend the
UNIBUS, but unofficially, I have attached a BA11 to a 730. It works, but
there are no shielded cables to stay FCC compliant with.
Just a few notes: The VUP is based on the speed of the 11/780 alone. The MicroVAX II is
0.9 VUP.
It will also run Ultrix (BSD UNIX). I recommend an
old version, say, 1.1.
Um... Ultrix is NOT BSD Unix. You may only have been saying that they're similar,
however....
We always used a tu80 on our 11/730. There are other
drives you can use,
but that was the cheapest way for us to go.
Best way to go: Find a Unibus SCSI controller. Rare, expensive, but well worth the cost.
--
J. Buck Caldwell
Engineer - Technical Support - Webmaster
Polygon, Inc. email:buck_c@polygon.com phone: (314) 432-4142
PO Box 8470 http://www.polygon.com/ fax: (314) 997-9696
St. Louis, MO 63132 ftp://ftp.polygon.com/ bbs: (314) 997-9682
5:21 a.m.
On Wed, 8 Jul 1998, J. Buck Caldwell wrote:
It is almost completely 4.2 BSD with some exceptions.
Ethan Dicks wrote:
[...]
It will also run Ultrix (BSD UNIX). I recommend
an old version, say, 1.1.
Um... Ultrix is NOT BSD Unix. You may only have been saying that they're similar,
however.... We always used a tu80 on our 11/730. There are
other drives you can use,
but that was the cheapest way for us to go.
Best way to go: Find a Unibus SCSI controller. Rare, expensive, but well worth the cost.
--
J. Buck Caldwell
Engineer - Technical Support - Webmaster
Polygon, Inc. email:buck_c@polygon.com phone: (314) 432-4142
PO Box 8470 http://www.polygon.com/ fax: (314) 997-9696
St. Louis, MO 63132 ftp://ftp.polygon.com/ bbs: (314) 997-9682
6:46 a.m.
Just a few notes: The VUP is based on the speed of the 11/780 alone. The
MicroVAX II is 0.9 VUP.
Yes, the 11/780 is a smidge faster than the uVAXII, however, I've seen .95 VUP
for the uVAXII, so I rounded up.
It will also run Ultrix (BSD UNIX). I recommend
an old version, say, 1.1.
Um... Ultrix is NOT BSD Unix. You may only have been saying that they're
similar, however.... > We always used a tu80 on our 11/730. There are
other drives you can use,
> but that was the cheapest way for us to go.
Best way to go: Find a Unibus SCSI controller. Rare,
expensive, but well
worth the cost.
I haven't seen one that I could afford. I'd love to have SCSI on *any* VAX.
I'd even considered building my own (I used to manufacture a Q-Bus/Unibus/VAXBI
line of synchronous serial cards based on the 68000). The thing that held me
back was a lack of knowledge of how to emulate an MSCP device with something
that is *not* register compatible with an RQDX[123] or UDA50. I have written
VMS device drivers from scratch, but not _disk_ device drivers.
-ethan
7:06 a.m.
Ethan Dicks wrote:
Personally, if it came to building a board from scratch, I'd have to say I'd
prefer a MSCP
compatible Dual IDE controller. Drives are cheaper. I can just see sticking four 5g IDE
drives into
my BA123 - 20 g of space, for less than a grand. Gee, I wonder if the power supply could
handle it
(snicker). There are MSCP docs somewhere out their on the web - or you could talk to the
NetBSD-vax
people, I believe at least one of them has the MSCP handbook. I'd buy it if you built
it. (well, a
Q-bus version, anyway)
--
J. Buck Caldwell
Engineer - Technical Support - Webmaster
Polygon, Inc. email:buck_c@polygon.com phone: (314) 432-4142
PO Box 8470 http://www.polygon.com/ fax: (314) 997-9696
St. Louis, MO 63132 ftp://ftp.polygon.com/ bbs: (314) 997-9682
Best way to
go: Find a Unibus SCSI controller. Rare, expensive, but well
worth the cost.
I haven't seen one that I could afford. I'd love to have SCSI on *any* VAX.
I'd even considered building my own (I used to manufacture a Q-Bus/Unibus/VAXBI
line of synchronous serial cards based on the 68000). The thing that held me
back was a lack of knowledge of how to emulate an MSCP device with something
that is *not* register compatible with an RQDX[123] or UDA50. I have written
VMS device drivers from scratch, but not _disk_ device drivers.
7 Jul
7 Jul
2:03 p.m.
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8 Jul
8 Jul
11:54 a.m.
At 00:03 08-07-98 +0100, you wrote:
Yeah, anybody out there got any printsets, operating manuals or *anything*
for our 730s?
Meanwhile, virtually *no* other additional info has turned up either in my
searches or results of my query to the list of yesterday.
On this particular model of 11/730, both TU58's are side-by-side on the
front. We can compare serial numbers which may, if the numbers make any
chronological sense, tell us which style was earlier (I suspect the
side-by-side was later.)
RL01's and -02's, RK07's and a single RA60 are the only drives I have
available. Both RA81's are spoken for I think. The RL01's and RL02's are
not practical from a capacity standpoint to run VMS on the 730 I feel
(*especially* the 5 MB RL01's!)
You mention an R80 drive above. Do you actually mean RA80?
Thanks agian for your valuable input!
Regards, Chris
-- --
Christian Fandt, Electronic/Electrical Historian
Jamestown, NY USA
Member of Antique Wireless Association
URL: http://www.ggw.org/freenet/a/awa/
Hi folks,
Still busy rummaging through the truckload of PDPs and VAXen and
peripherals and manuals, etc.
I'm looking for any info sources to learn more about a VAX 11/730. FAQs are
I've got one, but I've not done much with it, due to lack of technical
info, like a printset. And it's something of a big job to figure it all
out on my own... I know I have probably found a good home for the
11/750 but I am
considering keeping the 730. First I need to do a heap of studying to check
the completeness of the box and to more fully understand what peripherals
Now, this is digging into the depths of my memory, so I'm probably going
to get something wrong, but IIRC...
The box has a cardage on the left. On the right there's a PSU on top, and
a TU58 (strange layout, but otherwise a stock TU58) underneath. One tape
drive is on the front, the other (used for the system microcode) is on
the right side of the chassis.
There are 12 slots. At the top is the Integrated Disk controller (uses
the CPU logic for much of the functionality). It'll control an R80 (Much
modified SMD interface!), and RL drives. The next slot is for an optional
floating point board, and may be empty. The next 3 slots are the CPU
logic - don't ask me to remember what goes where!. The next 4 (?) slots
are for memory boards, and maybe unibus devices as well. The remaining
slots are Unibus slots. As standard a DMF32 (serial and parallel port)
card should be in one of them. It's not required, but VMS probably
expects it.
I'll try to get time to inventory the cards in the crate tonite and pass
the list of M-numbers on to the list. By comparing what-is-where, maybe we
can see if my box is somewhat complete. Input is very welcome from the
others on the list. IIRC, with just a brief look inside, most of the slots
were occupied. Three or four were empty I think.
I'm hopeful the field guide I mentioned in the PDP thread has all these
modules listed. Also, I'm hopeful the machine is complete although I know
the Ethernet controller has been swiped as the ribbon cable from the
connector panel in back is just hanging loose in the crate.
and accessories I that should keep (which are
already setting in the
garage) or to search for.
IF you don't have an R80, keep at least one RL drive, and some other
Unibus drive subsystem...
2:45 p.m.
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