Hello,

>> WARNING: bad date in battery clock
>And another 4xx machine with a busted clock.
Or one of the last Y2K bugs - I had the same problem with a 345, replaced the battery, the problem didn't go away, someone sent me a patch for the 
rtc code, I made a new kernel and everything is fine now.

>Do all the 400-series machines have external frame buffers?
No, some of them came with ordinary DIO-II framebuffers.

have fun
Michael