Thoughts on vaxen....

[User Rdkeys Robert D. Keys]

> Neil Johnson <neil at skatter.usask.ca> wrote:

> My office is full of VAXen, but I don't envision a PDP-11 coming in any time
> soon.

For the sake of discussion.....

What should one look for in a VAX?

Say I was walking along through our state surplus agency (and I do that
regularly these days, since all kinds of neato unicy goodies are popping
up from a lot of folks going to NT toys), what kind of parts and pieces
would I need to put together a minimal VAX, suited to some flavor of
homegrown 32V/3BSD/4BSD, etc.

Some of us would not really know one if it fell over on us.... like me.
Yet, IFF I knew enough of what to look out for, mebbie one might appear.
Everyone around here wants plain PC parts and machines in surplus, so
the rest usually gets dumpster chucked or hauled off for scrap by the
pallet load.  I just missed 3 relay racks full of such things as
9 track tape drives, and some sort of pdpish lookalike things.

So, what parts by name and number should I keep an eye out for, so
that enough of something might be cobbled together to work?

I have lots of experiences on PS/2, RT, and x86 unix boxes, but
am woefully short on pdp-11 and VAXen experiences.  I played with
a pdp-11 many years ago, but I did not know much then.  I am probably
not the only one.....

As ol' number 5 was want to say......``need input.... need input''

Thanks

Bob Keys


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