On October 29, you wrote:
> Here's some info about 11/730: 
> NetBSD does currently _not_ support 730, and it's no idea to try to 
> boot it either; it won't work. _But_: It would be rather easy to add
> 730 CPU support to NetBSD; if I had a 730 i could probably do that in
> a couple of hours. 

  Ack, I hadn't read this when I sent my other mail...Sorry Ragge...

  Can someone get this guy a 730?  I'm sure I could find one, but I
hesitate to think about shipping one of those across the pond... :-)

> Besides the CPU support it also needs some disks. If the 730 is equipped
> with RL02 - forget it. There are no RL02 device drivers in NetBSD and 
> it wouldn't be an good ides to try to install on a disk which is so 
> small that it cannot even hold the root filesystem :-) If the 730 is
> equipped with a R80 disk, a device driver needs to be written for this.
> If it is equipped with an UDA50 - feel lucky, it will work directly.
> How to boot such a beast? The only way is to boot from the TU58 tapes.
> A 730 cannot boot from directly from ethernet, but if the program 
> loaded from the TU50 contains code to load a kernel via the network 
> then it will work. But first, you must have a TU58 tape.

  The only 730s I've seen have an RB730 disk controller (the IDC,
"Integrated" or "Intelligent" disk controller) connected to an RL02 up
top and an R80 down below.

  4.3BSD supported the IDC board as idc0, with drives rb0 and rb1.  I
don't know if that stuff made it into 4.4 or not...maybe it can help.

  At this point I should remind folks that an 11/730 CPU isn't a
four-foot-tall floor-standing box.  It's a 10.5" high rack-mount box.
They were usually shipped mounted in the middle of a short rack with
an RL02 up top (10mb removable) and an R80 down below (121mb fixed).

  The R80 is actually an SMD drive and is the same mechanism as the
RM80.  The RM80 is a short rack with an R80 in the top and a card cage
underneath.  The card cage contains a MASSbus<->SMD adapter that talks
to the R80 SMD drive.  Similar things were done to the CDC 9762 to
turn it into an RM02/03, and the CDC 9766 to turn it into an RM05.
Underneath, they're just SMD drives.

  I point this out because one can save a great deal of power and heat
output by bypassing the MASSbus SMD controller and talking directly to
the SMD drive with a much more modern Unibus or Qbus SMD controller
from Emulex or something like that.  One board running hot instead of
twelve. :)

> Now I'll go back to my 11/785 that is trying to compile 1.3Alpha
> right now :-)

  Yesss!!!!  Now *that* is a manly computer!!


                          -Dave McGuire
                           mcguire@neurotica.com