After getting my VS3500 up and running, and almost getting NetBSD to work,
it was seriously in need of a power cord, it being badly frayed from
the previous owner.  When the new one was plugged in, the VAX lost its
smoke..... alas, one dead VS3500..... no joy.   A particular idiote
had wired the hot and neutral backwards.  Smoke and sparkes ensued 
with with great vigor and gusto.  Oh, well.  But, some joy comes out
of disasters like that..... I made a trip to the local state surplus
emporium, and off in the corner was sitting a pallet for 30 guildern
de realme with some nondescript computerese stuff on it that looked
strangely DECish, and a postscript laserjet printer that I really thought
would be worth hanging on a unix box.  So, after plunking down the stray
guildern, and dragging the stuff home, lo and behold, it had two DEC
mono monitors (VR262), two VAXstation 3100's, and two MicroVAX 3100's.
And, the postscript printer that I wanted worked just fine, too.
Several hours of dust bunny exorcisms and spit and polish detail seemed
to indicate that the stuff was in pretty good shape, physically, even.
Out of the group, I can make one good VS3100 and one good MV3100, each
with 8M ram and at least two RZ23's and and RZ33 in them.  So, I may
still have enuf to get one of those crazy VAXen toys up with Netbsd.

The questions now are:

1.  Which is better to use as a NetBSD box, the VS3100 with the VR262
    or the MV3100 with a serial something or other terminal and net.

    Perhaps I could make a server out of the MV3100 and an Xbox out of
    the VS3100?

2.  No tapes seem to exist for these things, but would a standard scsi
    tape work?

3.  I have a spare RZ24 and a spare RZ26L drive.  Combining those with
    a pair of RZ23's in the MV3100 might make a reasonable small home
    server?  (Yes/No?)

4.  Will normal scsi drives work in both machines or do they need DEC
    firmware.

5.  I was noticing in the NetBSD 1.3.2 VAX tree that floppy boots seemed
    to exist.  I know the VS3100 can use the floppy, so a boot on that
    via floppy may be reasonable?  Can a floppy be put on the MV3100
    and used to boot that?  What size floppy (720K or 1.4M) should be
    used?  There seemed to be two sets of floppy images.

6.  Is there a more recent VAX port than the 1.3.2 port?

7.  Any pointers to VS3100 or MV3100 hardware faq's about?


Mebbie I can still get a home VAX going....

Any pointers appreciated, and Thanks!

Bob Keys