Hi !

> All the VAX 6000 series live in the same enclosure about 1.5m tall, 780mm wide
> and 760mm deep, about 320kg in weight. Three phase supply chewing up about
> 1.6kW (although you may be able to adapt it for single phase use).

No problem, the corner is found, neat the 3-phase connector of my
radiator needing about 5 KW, so in the summer, i can misuse this
connector, if it's really 3-phase. 1.6 KW may even be too much for the
230 Volts phase in my computer room with 3 DEC VRT19-HA and much
hardware standing around. A friend killed the whole power of a little
city near the lake of constance with his experiments to get a very old
and big Siemens-Nixdorf computer running, i'll get powered up this VAX
with the radiator line.

> Each KA62B processor (1989 vintage) produces about 3.8VUPs and Digital
> officially supported up to six, by which time you are getting about 22VUPs. You
> can apparently have up to eight processors in there but I expect that the extra
> return on the 7th and 8th processors is somewhat diminished.

I don't know if it ever has been upgraded, i think it only has one CPU,
but at the moment i got such lots of DEC stuff, maybe i can get CPUs
from other sources.

> You can get an OpenVMS Hobbyist licence from www.montagar.com which will

Finally i got this URL what i looked for some months ago :-) Thanks !

> support this machine.I haven't seen anything about NetBSD support for the 6000
> series. But the processor is the same CVAX that is supported by NetBSD in the
> KA650-based MicroVAX 3500/3600 series so at least some of the CPU code exists
> already. There are technical manuals for most of the 6000 series - I know I
> have the ones for the 6000-500 and 6000-600 and maybe the 6000-400. I have a
> 6000-200/300 manual but I think that is the service manual and may not cover
> the CPU details needed to add support for this machine to NetBSD.

As it seems, the friend who told me about the 6310 has another friend
from DEC field service or so, who may have lots of useful stuff, maybe
even information about the SPX adapters in newer VAXstations. I'll keep
the contacts !

> There is a manual which covers the XMI details in quite some depth, although
> that is not obvious from its title. If you are interested in cooking up some
> support for the VAX 6000 platform let me know and I'll dig up all the
> references I have.

Hmmm. Maybe. If i find the time. But first i want to complete my VS 4000
VLC port (cache still doesn't work, don't know about initialization, and
uninitialized, the machine doesn't run very long).

> I believe that the VAX 8200 is supported so I presume that there must be some
> code kicking around for the VAXBI and KDB50 so you have at least one viable
> boot path. I expect that the hardware supports MOP booting over the XMI
> ethernet adapter (DEMNA) and there was definitely a technical manual for that
> so that may be another path to follow up.

I saw some source files named "vaxbi" or so... It's a start.

> Congratulations on finding such a useful box - you can produce anything from a
> VAX 6000-210 to a VAX 6000-460 in that box. If by some stroke of luck you have
> the later backplane (XMI2) or the adapter that turns the older backplane into
> the newer one then you can go all the way up to a VAX 6000-660 in the same cab!

Ok, if i really get it, i'll disassemble and analyze it, make photos of
everything for the visual field guide and such stuff. Just to transport
it, i have to disassemble the whole machine. (Camaros are not that goot
to transport large computers...)

so long.. Michael