Chuck McManis drunkenly mumbled...
> 
> Yes it is quite "doable" but requires some serious motivation. There are 

i'm motivated.  and when i'm motivated, people around me get motivated (it's
that or annoyed, they always seem to choose both for some reason)

> cheaper alternatives:
>          1) Goto to government, college, and liquidation auctions and bid
>             on everything that has DEC gear on it. Then rip it apart and
>             look for SCSI controllers. If you bid right you'll find one after
>             only $200 - $300 in bids, if you resell the left overs on Ebay
>             you can probably break even (and get one for "free" that way)
>             (you will also get literally a ton of vax stuff)

or i can just toss it in with my already literal ton o' crap.  :)

seriously though, i'm a collector, so i should do this just for the mass amount
of stuff i can collect.  hmmmmm, where would be a good place to look for these
things?   i'll check with the local colleges.  i've been getting what i can
from work (i really would have liked those two 6000-410 machines, but didn't
have $2500 for them) but that just never seems to be what i need.

sadly i was laid off last week (stupid swedes cutting budgets) but i have a
good chance of getting a job at the Lucent here, and having worked for Lucent
before, i know they usually have TONS of old Sun and DEC stuff laying around.

>          2) Watch the "crannies" on Ebay, sometimes people sell systems that
>             have SCSI controllers in them but list them as the complete system.
>             Look in the pictures, ask the seller questions.
>             I bought three this way in one transaction!

hmm, this is definitely something to consider.  i hate crabbin around ebay
though, i don't think i'm patient enough for it.

>          3) Buy an old PC chassis, put a 10MB ethernet card in it and a couple
>             of IDE drives and use NFS mounts. (this is the cheapest/fastest
>             way to get SCSI)

i've already got enough disk floating around here that's connected up to 
machines that would serve as excellent NFS servers (primarily Sun hardware)
so this is the fall-back plan (and until i have drives hooked up to my VAX
crates that NetBSD can use, my current solution)

>          4) Buy some parallel I/O cards (these are often pretty cheap) and
>             write a software SCSI driver.

how hard would this be?  i could probably steal code from the parallel ZIP
driver.

>          5) Design a Qbus card that talks MSCP and SCSI.

this is what i want to do, just cause it's the coolest. ;)

> Now the latter will "cost" in the neighborhood of $3,000 (trust me, I've 
> priced it) Fortunately you can do the whole thing these days with one FPGA 
> and some
> buffer RAM so the components are fairly simple. DEC has a patent on MSCP 
> that has yet to expire, so you will need to either license the patent 
> (probably darn near impossible) or sell only "plans" so that people can 
> make one themselves (which is allowed by patent law)

hmmmmmmmm.

> If you get to the point where you have the board and it works, then you can 
> probably sell 100 - 200 for $75 each, which after your costs will make you 
> about $15 each. If you do sell 200 then you'll again make back your investment.

i'm not even interested in a profit.  just enough for a good case of beer
every once in a while (Hacker-Pschorr Dunkel Weisse is appropriate)

> Yup. MSCP is documented in the UDA50 programmers manual and in the patent 
> (I don't have the number handy but you should be able to find it fairly 
> easily from the archives.) The Qbus is very well documented but its quirks 
> are less so. I suggest the Xilinx Spartan II FPGA for the design because it 
> is dense, relatively cheap, and infinitely reprogrammable.

i think i'll track down this electronics friend of mine and see if he has any
interest in this, i think you've given me enough to present to him.

-brian

ps: you want those cables?