hello

> You host it, I host it.  What's the difference?  :-)  I think what is more
> important is that it gets done.  Although, I think it would be cool if I
> hosted it, so I can always say "I was a part of it".  

 :-)

yeah, i knwo what you mean.. 
well, if we can get a few people and all the right expertise, i very much 
want to produce or at least begin the design of a VAX compatible machine. 
I still want to be ambitious and start with completely fresh designs  as 
far as peripheral and so on connects go, and the like, and id like to 
keep as true to the form and beauty of the VAX architecture as possible. 


> 
> I'm not the best with HTML.  Anybody on the list a killer Web page
> designer type person?  I've got PHP3 and mod_perl, and the eperl module.
> Setting up mysql, so I can do some neat stuff on here.

somebody in this thread wanted a kb/mouse cable for a DS5k. Ive got a 
couple of these lying around. I remember you were in britain, and so 
shipping might not even be worth it on a 10UKP item! (i take it P&P was a 
local brew?) 


As for web pages, i think perhaps int he beginnign we should just have 
something more or less statuic that announces that were producing a VAX 
clone machine designed to be 100% bit-compatible with a 'real' VAX 
without infringing on any of DEC's technology ownerships, and that we aim 
to produce these machines at competetive prices and performances on a par 
with other modern machines. 
I must say that though i want to see a completely native and custom 
implementation, the first go at  it might be better done using somethign 
like strongARM chips or something. There will probably be generous use of 
gate arrays here. 
 FPGA's are not cheap. One with several thousand gates will run you in 
the realm of US$40-60 depending on speed. 
I dont anticipate that the production cost of a machine we could make 
would be below US$5000, and it will probably be more in the realm of US$7000
and a very very primitive guess at what it woudl take. This doesnt 
include what the develipment, prototyping, testing, and debugging would 
cost. 
I want to make the machine modular, with each module being a VAX nexus 
like in the big VAXen (7x0's, 6000s, 8000s) and the interface being as 
all nexi speak, nothing but virtual,paged, scatter/gather DMA. Each 
device will have to manipulate VAX page tables and use a nontrivial 
amount of circuitry. This might be best done with a microprocessor and 
PROM, though i think a couple of gate arrays would be better or cleaner. 
The cheap shot way to do it all would be to make a bus adapter which is a 
nexus, and then hang devices off ot it which are not. Not as beautiful 
and doesnt take full advantage of the true power of the VAX architecture, 
which is that wonderfully equitable 'conference' of edevices, all of 
which are euqally powerful citizens of a virtual memory system, all of 
which manipulate page atbles and memory in the same way, some of which 
are processors but all of which can be masters or slaves. 
We might also consider using NVAX processors for our first machine. They 
are still (very expensive i would believe) in existence and available in 
_some_ quantity. I  dont know enough about this to be anywhere near 
authoritative though. 

anyhow, tomorrow i plan on registering nuvax.com. It probably wont be til 
the 14th or 15th of sep when i get back that well ahve the thing 
registered and ready, but if you could give me a home for it to go so 
that when i register it they have nameservers and stuff, that woudl be cool.
 if not, ill host iton one of my own machines for the ime being and we 
can xfer it to you later. 
(im in the process of switching my home's main gateway machine (not made 
by gw2k, of course, but an old i386 laptop running an old somewhat BSDified 
linux) into either a DECstation 5000/240, or a VAXstation 3100/48. Both 
run Utlrix 4.4. Ive had no luck getting PPP to work in ultrix, as i 
believe my incomplete installation (i have no utlrix/RISC media) is 
broken somewhat, but the VAX might work. It'd be on a static IP that's 
available about 98% of the time,  and can be found under the name 
guildvax.guild.net (or isildur.icubed.com, which it would reverse to) :) 
As i've planned for ages to have a VAX up on the world where VAXophiles 
and DECophiles in geenral can hang out, share code, share old stuff, and 
shhare information, as well as compute on a VAX, (preferably running 
4.3BSD, which my microVAX-2 runs!), i would love to have the nuVAX 
project also hosted on my machine! 

Where are we all located physically? I'm in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. 
Also what VAX materiel and documentation do we have between us all?

One thing i think we are gonna have to think about real hard is how on 
earth would we get around the 512 MB memory limit!?? this modern world 
wont tolerate it! 
 i want to ship a VAX with 4 GB of fully populated address space which 
will still support a program written for an 11/780!
well, i want to be able to run anythign that will run on an 11/780, which 
is _the_ reference machine for this, being the first VAX and all. :) 

arright this is long enough for now!

 happy hacking all,
isildur!