On Wed, 1 Mar 1995, Szabolcs Szigeti (PinkPanther) wrote:

> I know it's not the port-wish-list, but just a quick query:
> 
> Anyone working/planning to work on VAX 8000 ?. We've just received
> a VAX8530 machine with a bunch of RA82's and allegedly 128(?) M RAM.
> 
> So far we managed to blow the fuses in the building then boot VMS :-).

Well, at least you know it works. The 8000 series (more correctly refered
to as the Nautilus series [The VAXstation-8000 also existed and was
a Q-bus system]) does not generally like to be moved, but once you get
it to run, will probably run for a couple of years before dying in a
horrible way (the voice of experience - I maintain 3 8800s :-)

> Should we dump the whole thing, or is there any chance NetBSD could be booted
> on it? How different is it from the uVAXII`s and 750's?

Well, the boot process is similar in concept but entirely? different in
practice. The Pro console provides a lot of the control for the system
and, in particular, provides the copy of VMB.EXE used to boot VMS. I guess
that this is similar to the way that a 11/780 boots but I have no real
idea how to organize to boot something else. Is there anyone on the list
who has the time/will/documentation to explain further?
 
> I'd be willing to help/experinent/debug, but don't have much docs.

I've got at least one 8800 that I could experiment with (in a software sense)

 Huw Davies                      | e-mail: Huw.Davies@latrobe.edu.au
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