hello

> 	A guy here at work is throwing out some old VAX'es (Vaxi? ??), and
> I wanted to see if any were worth holding on to.  I looked ovr the VAX
> info pages, and it wasn't totally clear to me what models these are, and
> what (if anything) I could expect them to be able to do running NetBSD.

you could do anything you'd do on any other machine running NetBSD, 
except with the VAX you'd also get some freebies:
-heat the house
-you'd be hacking in style on one of the coolest architectures ever
-the most memory-efficient 32 bit architecture youll ever see
-a damn nice assembly language! 

> 
> VAX Station 2000 (Model No. VS410-BA) (one of these)
> MicroVAX II (Model No. 630QB-A2) (two of these)
> VAX Station (Model No. VX5XB-AA) (two of these)
> 

the 2000 is the slowes tof these, unless he VAXstations at the bottom are 
VAXstation I's, in which case theyre abou tthe slowest VAXen ever made. 
The 2000's are nice small boxen though and have the dsistinction of
being just about the littlest VAX ever made and , when diskless, the 
quietest. Not to mention that without a disk, they only consume like 80W
of power and woudl thus be the most power-economical VAX. Theyre moderately
powerful, and will serve a single user quite fine. built in video and 
ethernet, as well. 

the microVAX-II's are really nice machines. still somewhat slow, but it 
cant be compared to a PC. in most cases, you can expect out of it what you'd
expect out of a like a 386-33. These can handle lots more IO than a PC, 
though i nthe case of a 'II the processor is slower. However, theres no 
straight comparison form one machine to another.. 


> 	So, any of these worth playing around with?  Any idea what the
> model numbers mean exactly?  Any of these capable of more than say, a
> i386SX?

yes, yes, and yes. 


:-)

get these machines, and enjoy them! 

happy hacking,
 isildur