Hello everyone, sorry to keep up with these newbie questions.
I have made a fair amount of progress recently.  The new keyboard works
fine, and the nvram problems are repaired (many thanks to Peter Koch, his
nvram repair procedure is great!)  The sun 3/80 now gets an IP address via
rarp, netboot via tftp, and gets a kernel via nfs.  the kernel boots and
almost before I can read anything it just repeats 'esp0:SCSI bus reset'
forever, it fills the screen quickly.  I am using netbsd 1.3.2 and the
netbsd-rd kernel image. I have specified in bootparams that 
root=server:/boot/sun3x.  the kernel image and the unzipped miniroot
filesystem file are both there.  
Have I configured something incorrectly, do I need a newer version of
netbsd?  The system only has 8MB memory after all, but I am sure I will
upgrade that if I can get it to boot.

Many thanks,
Steve Roylance