> 
> A dark room, an 8650 and a terminal.
> The 8650 has the doors opened. Turning the power on on the 8650 just turns
> on a single diode on one power supply in the 8650. The terminal shows that
> the front end is booting. After a while the terminal prints:
> "INITIALIZING POWER"
> and one after one, the power supply LEDs lights up, and after about 8
> seconds, you have a nice warm glow from a line of power supplies, all now
> initialized and supplying power.
> "INITIALIZING CPU"
> and you know that the CPU is now fed microcode from the RL02 on which the
> front end is running. You also know that if you care to, you can get to
> the RT-11 prompt on the front end, start up your favourite editor and
> change the microcode you you like that. Once this step is done, you'll
> actually have a VAX. Before this, there is nothing.
> ("And the FE loaded the microcode and said ''Let there be VAX'', and there
> was VAX, and everyone was happy.")
> "INITIALIZING MEMORY"
> now the memory system gets fed whatever it likes. Soon the system will
> actually be a whole computer, who will start to boot, or whatever,
> depending on how you set the keys.
> 
Well, this matches rather well the 8800 also :-) It is the same feeling 
when ftp.luth.se needs to be restarted. Because of its stability; this 
normally only happens after a power outage and because some of the 50-60
RA9x disks on it have died :-)

VMB on it takes 40 minutes to check 512MB of memory...

-- Ragge