> I am not all that worried about speeeeeeeed, but mostly the reliability
> and maintainability of the box.

They are a good choice for that.  Use a good hard disk (Maxtor 2190<RD54>)
and your all set.  Note the 71mb drive RD53 aka Micropolus 1325 tends to
be problematic due to mostly old age.

> I was reading in the decvax journal on one of the archives that
> there was a rather ugly problem with power cabling and connectors
> buning on some 11000 of the machines.  Is that likely to be a problem?

They were eco'd the check for this is inspect and see if it's the older
UNEVEN LENGTH WIRES harness that goes from PSU to BACKPLANE.  The ECO'd 
part (HARNESS) has all wires of the same length.  

> Sounds good.  I was mainly wanting something to play with, and since
> the machine might be available thought I would inquire.

I run two but with VMS and they just run...

> How does it compare to a MIcroVAX 3100 in speed?  I sense they
> are about the same order of slowness.

NO, It's .9VUP, the 3100s start off at 2.3ish and go up from there.
The 3100 NetBSD port is limited by the scsi IO being PIO rather 
than DMA.  

What makes the MVII appealing is it's likely the most common and easy to
find.  Also they can carry more serial lines than the 3100s!

Allison