> > SCSI yes.  Q-bus no.  Get real.  No one is going to produce cards for this
> > beast since the market is so small.  You are going to have to use a commodity
> > bus such as PCI to get peripherals.  If Compaq were to make a new VAX, you
> > can be use it would be PCI based with no ISA.  
> 
>  yeah, as i said in my previous post. Qbus is not very fast. 
> Like Matt also pointed out, being asynchronous, you cant preserve 
> compatibility with the old Qbus devices and still speed things up much. 
> 
Okay, scratch that, then.  Make an adapter for whatever bus that can talk
to qbus based devices.  I think the VAX 4000s or something around that
have that.

> As for PCI, i eally hate PCI :-) 
>
PCI is evil.  

> If we really must, then let one of our nexus devices which connects to 
> the spiffy hi speed TC backplane be a PCI adapter a-la unibus adapters 
> weve seen in BI and SBI VAXen, 750s, and so on.. :) Then the PCI bus will 
> be interfaced to the machine itself via an adapter which is a true VAX 
> nexus, though we should ourselevs also produce IO devices which , for a 
> higher perfoamnce and lower load on the system, (and higher price probly) 
> offer ture VAX nexus devices for the same stuff. 
> Then low end stuff can come with only a couple nexus slots or even none 
> at all and have the PCI nexus on the motherboard, and then just have PCI 
> as the peripheral interconnect. At any rate i suggest that thinsg 
> on-board all be nexi. Theres more work, but it will be worth it in 
> cleanliness and elegance and also scalability and lower overhead. We have 
> the vast advantage architecturally in a machine that can scale to 
> incredible IO like nothing else in the world except an IBM mainframe. 
> Lets take dvantage of that power! 
> 
Okay, do the same thing with Qbus.  We've got to have that, so I can throw
my 16 serial ports from my uVax-II into it.  Nah, scratch that.  How about
a native card that has that.  To make it cheap, we can have it use RJ45
connectors, instead of DB25 or DB9.  However, if we do have a card with
DB25 RS232 serial, make sure it uses all pins.  If you are not going to
have all pins on DB25 port, why use it?  Go with DB9 and save money!
Seeing only 9 pins or less being used on a DB25 connector makes me sick.

If compaq doesn't see Vax as a viable, profitable platform, I see no
reason why they shouldn't be willing to help the few remaining vax people
out there, who want to make a clone.  Who knows, we might even be able to
buy the vax architecture.  

Also, another thing.  We need to make sure that nobody buys vaxen, or
pieces there of from compaq, or a compaq authorized reseller, unless they
bring the prices down.  $20,000 for something that isn't profitable seems
to me like they are wanting to make a profit!

Regards,
John Havard