Well, to respond to a few of those VAX-related questions as best I can... :)
1) There are lots of resources out there featuring VAX information; you might want to
look at the NetBSD/vax port website (
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports), the VAXarchive
(
http://vaxarchive.org), and Hamster's Digital Resources site, which can be found at
http://www.telnet.hu/hamster/dr.
2) I don't believe there is any sort of hobbyist distribution of Ultrix, however you
can run the hobbyist distribution of OpenVMS (
http://www.montagar.com/hobbyist), or
if you're interested in a UNIX, NetBSD is available for a number of VAXen.
3) All microVAX systems use some variety of serial terminal for a system console
(although I believe it has to be VT100 compatible, so I'm not sure how useful that
ADM terminal will be). VAXstation systems are the ones that use monitors as
consoles, however it is possible to get them to run over a serial console as well
using a few different methods depending on which model you have.
Hope this is helpful :)
-Sean Caron (root(a)diablonet.net)