> X-X-Sender: <linc@behemoth.linc.com>

I think that may be the first X-X- header I've seen. :-)

> Just out of curiosity, I was wondering if you all wouldn't mind
> listing what kind(s) of vaxen you have running and what yo use them
> for.

Well, I feel vaguely intimidated by all these people with things that
dim the streetlights when they're fired up.  Three-phase power, cooling
blowers that you could build a ground-effect vehicle with....

I have only one VAX that's in operating shape (as in, if I turned it on
it would run), that being a MicroVAX-II in what I think is a BA123 (the
deskside chassis on casters, with 12+1 slots).

I have bits enough to build at least one and I think two more machines;
I have another identical chassis plus one of the skinny 6-slot kind
(BA23, I think it is), and more than enough boards of at least some
kinds (KA630, DEQNA, serial, disk controller, TK50 controller).  What I
don't have in any significant quantity is disk compatible with any
Q-bus controller I have.  I have RA controllers, but only a few working
disks, and them small ones; I've SCSI disk in plenty, but no Q-bus SCSI
interface (not even non-bootable).  If I were to turn on my VAX, it
would boot diskless - it has CPU, RAM, RAM, DEQNA, nothing more.

I also have a shoebox VAX of some stripe.  I have reason to think it's
broken, though; it appears to overheat almost instantly unless I have
the whole thing spread out on the table with a fan blowing directly on
the CPU.  I can't believe this is normal, so there must be something
wrong.  The front of the case says it's a VAXstation 2000; the back
says its model number is VS410-EA.  It's only an assumption that the
electronics inside matches the markings on the case, though, AFAIK - is
there any other VAX that can be put in this case?  (It's definitely a
VAX; I've had it running long enough to know that.  It came to me with
VMS on its disk, and somewhere I have a dd image of that disk....)

My first experience with VAXen was when I came to Montréal in 1980 and
started using a 780.  It was "the VAX" at the time; you don't name
machines when you have only the one!  It had a removable-pack
top-loading disk drive that had probably some 60 MB or so of space and
held the entire lab on it - these days I regularly have swap partitions
larger than that on my home boxen.  Later we got two similar (removable
top-loading) drives of 300MB each.  Still later we got two 750s and
named them, Larry, Moe, and Curly (Moe was the 780).  Then came
MicroVAX-IIs...I fondly remember the days of doing robot control on a
uVII running mtXinu 4.3+NFS, with the control law running on a KA620
auxiliary CPU, under a microkernel I wrote for the purpose.  Wish we'd
had a BA123 for it; it was in a BA23, which meant the aux CPU more or
less had to make do with its onboard RAM.  (KA630, its memory, KA620,
that left no Q/CD slots for RAM for the 620.)  Yes, a KA620 - at the
time, it was hell to try to get a KA630 without the rest of a machine
around it; these days, I've got more KA630s than I have cardcages, and
no KA620s at all.  How times change. :-)  As part of that project, we
found a hardware bug in the KA630....

That 780, under VMS, was where I went through my larval stage.  At some
point we got an early variant of Eunice on it and its UNIXisms confused
me dreadfully; when we started running BSD4.1c on the 750s, all the
UNIXisms started to make a whole lot more sense....

</reminisce>

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