VAX 9440

[Jim Manley]

Evan said it was in service until a couple of months ago, so it should
power up OK, if it could all be electrically and mechanically stitched back
together carefully.  The question is probably, could they afford the power
bill?  We have a bunch of Crays and CDCs at the Computer History Museum,
and if they were operational, we'd probably have to take up a special
very-large-hat-passing collection just to pay the power bill for the
multiple,- multi-ton refrigeration units (at least one was about a
seven-ton unit, IIRC)!  Then, there's the problem of replacement parts for
when, not if, things fail, not to mention the labor expertise and
availability.  It's one thing to replace discrete transistors in our IBM
1401, but, it's quite another to desolder and yank various little black
rectangles off extremely dense circuit boards without destroying anything
else ... and then solder in a replacement, if you can find one not already
firmly attached to another board with another kind of failure.  That
assumes that problems can even be isolated, although at least more modern
systems tend to have self-diagnostic capabilities, at least above a certain
level of functionality, or lack thereof.

On Sat, Nov 10, 2018 at 3:26 AM Pontus Pihlgren via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> That is a behemoth!!
>
> Did you ger that huge powerforming thingy that goes
> with it?
>
> Are you crazy enough to atempt a power-up?
>
> /P
>
> On Wed, Nov 07, 2018 at 09:55:07PM -0500, Evan Koblentz via cctalk wrote:
> > The VCF museum took delivery of a VAX 9440 today.
> >
> > It arrived in two 28-foot trailers. Here's our forklift driver
> > beginning to unload the first truck:
> >
> >
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E-Q5xrsYXyjrZEZh92xIBhlStvvNUcRV/view?usp=sharing
> >
> > Here's a teaser picture of the main cabinet:
> >
> >
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bEpSMzBEeOvuDnzPQ9Npc7iYmDhjZq8c/view?usp=sharing
> >
> > The full system is 30-40 feet long when it's all set up! It is in
> > pristine condition and was in service at a defense contractor until
> > a couple of months ago.
> >
> > Rumor has it that we arranged for another one to land in Dave
> > McGuire's Large Scale Systems Museum collection, and a third to be
> > with Bob Roswell's System Source collection. :)  Perhaps they'll
> > post updates too!
>