On October 29, you wrote:
> <I was always told that about the 11/750 as well.  However, we got one that
> <was being discarded by the chem department when I was an undergrad.  We
> <plugged it in, turned it on, and it happily booted VMS from its disk.  Is
> 
> I'll bet someone put a tu58 hardware emulator or other mod in there.  If 
> there is no tape in a stock 750 it just looks at you.

  Yes...the 750 loads microcode from the TU58 when it starts up...It
doesn't even know the full VAX instruction set until it spins that
tape, as I understand it.

  The TU58 is, however, a *very* simple beast.  It communicates via a
serial line using a very simple protocol.  It'd be trivial to emulate
that with pretty much any computer with a serial port running a little
program.


                    -Dave McGuire
                     mcguire@neurotica.com