Purchased a Microvax 3800

[devin davison]

I got the power cord for the microvax 3800 in the mail today. I checked the
fans as someone suggested, they Spin nice and smooth. I Iooked over
everything, nothing seems out of place. I powered the machine on. Very
quiet. I expected it to be much louder.

I turned the machine on and nothing exploded.
The KA660 cpu board has that little red lcd display ion it. A F is
displayed. Not sure if that is normal or not. I need a console cable. I
have a vt100 that works over here. What is the cable called, is it
something i could buy, or is it something that is easy enough to make?

--Devin

On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 3:37 PM, devin davison <lyokoboy0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> "So a 9-track open-reel SCSI drive should work just as well as a DDS,
> DLT, SLT drive."
>
> Oh wow. i had not even considered that. I have a pdp 11 with a beast of a
> 9 track tape drive in is's own rack, that would be interesting if i could
> get a scsi tape drive for the vax and use some big tapes to move data
> between the two.
>
>
> On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 11:38 AM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at update.uu.se>
> wrote:
>
>> On 2015-12-08 17:02, Paul Koning wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 2015-12-07 20:36, Christian Gauger-Cosgrove wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 7 December 2015 at 14:29, Johnny Billquist <bqt at update.uu.se> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I think all (modern PDP-11) OSes can install from TMSCP tapes. RSTS/E
>>>>> is
>>>>> more picky than some others, though, if I remember right...
>>>>>
>>>>> Yes, RSTS/E installs from TMSCP just fine (as can RSX-11/M+); I know
>>>> that in simh you can bring up Ultrix-11 3.1 only on TMSCP
>>>> (specifically a TK50), at least if you want all of the packages to
>>>> install. I've installed RSTS/E 10.1-L from MASSBUS, TS11, TM11, and
>>>> TMSCP in my various experimentation with emulation, it really doesn't
>>>> care what the tape is as long as your SYSGEN device is consistent.
>>>>
>>>
>>> One detail on "it doesn't care what the tape is": RSTS kits on 1/2 inch
>>> tape come in 800 and 1600 bpi versions.  They have different boot blocks,
>>> each of them designed to work with all tape drives/controllers supported on
>>> RSTS that support the density in question.  For example, the 1600 bpi kit
>>> doesn't boot on a TM11 controller, and the 800 bpi kit won't boot on a
>>> TMSCP controller.  This matters if you try to boot one in an emulator where
>>> physical tape density doens't have any meaning.
>>>
>>
>> Unsubscribed from cctalk now, so I'm not sure if this will get through or
>> not.
>>
>> The RSX installation tape should boot from all tape devices, no matter
>> what density. The disk boot blocks are somewhat more specific. MSCP sits
>> together with massbus and RK06/RK07. RK05, RL01/02, RP02/03 as well as P/OS
>> drivers are separate boot blocks. Of those, only the RL02 is actually
>> supported by M+. So in practice, you only see one of two disk boot blocks
>> around for M+. 11M use pretty much anything, I'd think.
>>
>>         Johnny
>>
>>
>