Well the VS3100's can use either. The keyboard's the LK201 from the VT220 or later DEC terminals. (I think they can use the LK401 as well). The mouse is the VSXXX-AA. The video monitor differs with the video card. Plug a keyboard into a vtxxx and the VTxxx to the back serial port and skip plugging a monitor into the pizza box. I believe there's a small dip switch next to the ethernet that needs to be flipped. I think it's in the FAQ. Bill --- Bill Gates is a Persian cat and a monocle away from being a villain in a James Bond movie -- Dennis Miller bpechter@shell.monmouth.com|pechter@pechter.dyndns.org

The two cards are either SPX or GPX. But the mobo has a monochrome graphics section that allows decwindows eg in mono. on pins 9 and 3 (oops?) of the 15 pin female plug. in netbsd/vax I havent been able to run a mono X ....on a mono screen, but the console looks quite good that way, and in netbsd/vax you can choose the console type, vt220 or less. Fred Fred

You won't need a DEC drive specifically, but you will need one which supports 512 byte sectors and one which supports booting. On Mon, 18 Jun 2001, Anthony Clifton - Retrocomputing.com wrote: --

Nice. Lots of room there for a VAX. I'm assuming it's a Half-Hieght drive? If so it's a TZ30. I'm not aware of there ever having been a SCSI TK70. Erm, not sure why you'd want to. If you're going to have a real OS on the MicroVAX 3100 (VMS), I'm not sure if you'll be able to write out NetBSD anyway. Remember my motto, it's a VAX, it should be running VMS! :^) A new Plextor drive would work, as would any Sun or SGI Bootable drive. Zane

Yes, the TZ30 is a SCSI TK50 drive, not to be confused with the TK50Z, which is a full hieght SCSI TK50. The Hobbyist license that costs $100 is Tru64 for Alpha. VMS is free with a DECUS (OK, now it's Encompass) membership, and the media kit if you need it is something like $20 (I forget what). Not quite.... Intel - Linux or Solaris VAXen & Alpha - OpenVMS DECstation - NetBSD Sparc - Solaris Zane

Great! :^) Clustering is fun! You can probably set it up so if they telnet to port 'x' they're automatically directed to port 23 on the VAX. All depends on your router. Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | healyzh(a)holonet.net (alternate) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

The TZ30 is compatible with the TK50. There are also SCSI TK50 drives, but they are full-height. I never got around to using a TZ30, even though there are a couple around at work. We just don't have anything on TK50-formatted tapes. I went from a TK50 to a TK70 to an Exabyte 8200 to a TLZ04 to a DLT4000, so I don't know how the TZ30 is in terms of speed and reliability compared to a TK50. I remember going through a few TK50 drives, most of which where due to people abusing the drives. The 8200 drive seemed to wear out about every six months, even with proper cleaning. I never had a problem with my TLZ04 or my DLT4000. At work we have TZ867 and TZ877 drives, and it seems we have about one replaced every three months, but they get a LOT of use, and if we have any glitches that can't be explained on a bad tape or operator error the drive gets replaced. If the TZ30 is anything like the TK50 I'd limit using it to just reading existing TK50-formatted tapes and get a cheap TLZ04 or TLZ06 from eBay for backups. The OpenVMS Hobbyist program is free. The Tru64 Enthusiast program costs $100. I have one VAX system (and one Charon-VAX emulator) and three Alphas running VMS and one Alpha running Tru64 V5.1. I only have the Alpha running Tru64 for keeping up with Tru64. I really prefer VMS. Horrible default operating system? Hah! A VAX should only run VMS or, if necessary, VAXELN. [warning, topic drift ahead!] I haven't had to deal with ELN for a couple of years now. I never got deep into ELN on purpose, but where I used to work we had a Schlumberger S90 memory tester that was MVII-based running an old version of ELN. We were having performance problems getting some vectors generated quickly during test (the parts were taking several minutes to test) so it was decided to try to port the software to a new version of ELN so it would run on a VAX 4000-105A with a QBUS adapter. Unfortunately, I only had a month to get the port working and it took a long time to just get the sofware modified to compile with the new version. I ran out of time to get any timing problems fixed as I could only have the tester at limited times to debug. Rather than go ahead and buy the 4000 management decreed we return the demo unit. The manager acted like any money spent in the department came out of his personal bank account. He used to gloat about how he was the only manager that always had a surplus in the budget every year, while those of us working in the department had to deal with obsolete equipment and limited supplies. If the porting project would have been impossible due to the timing issues we still would have had a huge performance increase over our host MV3900. On the 3900 compiling the S90 test programs (written in VAXELN Pascal) took about 15 minutes. On the 4000 the time went down to about 2 minutes. -- Eric Dittman dittman(a)dittman.net

ELM is a mailer for Unix. It's similar to Pine (in fact, Pine stands for Pine is Not Elm) but without the uncessary (imho) features. It has - or used ot have, I think they may have been split off into a seperate product now - a system to filter mail upon reception, handles multiple mailbox files, does NOT handle mime except to write it out as files (which is all that is really useful to do with them, IMHO) and calls the editor of your choice. I use ELM for the vast majority of my e-mail, the exceptions being at work where I have to use Microsoft Virus Transfer Protocol (outlook) and at home when I get a message with a mime attachment, when I just leave the message in the inbox and suck it down onto my BeOS machine in Postmaster. Elm was written by (if memory serves) Dave Taylor of HP. It could have been an HP product, but HP passed and he released it to the world. The most recent release I'm aware of was to patch the y2k issues ELM had. If you'd like an ELM screenshot, mail me offline and I'll send you one when I get home. -- Jim Strickland jim(a)DIESPAMMERSCUMcalico.litterbox.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------- BeOS Powered! -----------------------------------------------------------------------

Okay, that's cool. :) -- Jim Strickland jim(a)DIESPAMMERSCUMcalico.litterbox.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------- BeOS Powered! -----------------------------------------------------------------------

(which I think is currently unavailable) doesn't support ethernet, so it's pretty much worthless from my point of view, and they want a LOT more than an actual VAX would cost you for a version that does. It's from the same company that's done a commercial PDP-11 emulator for several years. Timothy Stark, the guy that's done the ts10 emulator (first publically available KS10 emulator that was actually able to boot TOPS-10) is working on adding VAX-11/780 support to his emulator. Though he's spending most of his time working on the PDP-10 side of it. IIRC, there is also work underway to add VAX emulation to simh (which now has excellent KS10 emulation). Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | healyzh(a)holonet.net (alternate) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

I've got a bunch of external Sun and Vax compatible CD drives - in the double speed an single speed ranges -- they're surplus to me since I've picked up faster ones at http://www.hitechcafe.com. I've now got some 16x stuff which cost me about $40 plus a couple for the external case. So... anyone interested can contact me off list. Bill --- Bill Gates is a Persian cat and a monocle away from being a villain in a James Bond movie -- Dennis Miller bpechter@shell.monmouth.com|pechter@pechter.dyndns.org

Anthony Clifton - Retrocomputing.com skrev: Got to try that some time. OTOH, I only wish there were an eBay around here. OTOH, the lack thereof gives me at least some breathing space in my room. =) If they've got such capabilities, they're called VAXstations. Look at the back of the MicroVAX. The only ports around there are serial ports, SCSI and Ethernet, IIRC. Plug it in, plug it in. Assuming you've got a real VT with those odd modular connectors, at least. Or is there a magic switch for using the DB25 on the back, pray tell? -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6a. The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.

May I ask a philosophical question? My take on the vaxStation in general is that is allows graphics on the desktop without limiting the user to having to maintain the server, and further the server is shareable to many places. This is diluted somewhat by the impression that vaxStation/vaxServer pizza boxes go good together in pairs. once more: is this Correct? Were vaxStations (2000,3100) intended to run XWindows client (called Server) on top of Ultrix? Were there any other major software configurations? I guess if you weren't doing graphics then the Stations may have been overkill? John A.

On Thu, 21 Jun 2001, Tom Uban wrote: Dont know about VT1000, but VT1200 and VT1300 are completely different beasts, VT1200 a ROM based Mono Xterminal using the TI 34081? processor. It has a really old version of X, maybe 11.3 in its ROMs. The VT1300 is just a VS3100/30 with no disk controller or drive plate and loads its XServer from the net (same server as VXT2000 I believe) Peter Wallace

On Thu, 21 Jun 2001, Fred deBros wrote: GPX is 8 bit color 1024X864 60 Hz refresh (for VR290,VR297 etc) SPX can do 8 bit color 1280x1024 66 Hz refresh (for VRT16, VRT19 etc) SPX is about 3 times as fast as GPX (24 Mpixels/s versus 8) AFAICR Peter Wallace Mesa Electronics