ok, i'm gonna cover all of these at one shot:

Gunther said:

>  Brian, I am in Indianapolis. You are right, these are excitingly
>  large machines :-). I will probably take them into my garage in
>  custody (where they will have to share a bed with my 75 Cadillac,
>  speaking of old stuff :-) So, you can see that if I take all three

wow, sounds like you got a great deal there.  sadly, that's a little far away
for a trip right now (don't have the funds to take a trip of that calibre at
the moment)

75 caddy, sweet.  '79 Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce here.  needs a carburator, but
i will definitely be driving it this summer.

>  of them home, I need to get rid of two of them quickly (or else
>  someone get's rid of me :-).

mine is understanding, she knows she doesn't have a chance of getting me to
stop collecting this stuff.  :)

>  - most machines have 2 CPUs

sweet.

>  - one has even 4 CPUs

*drool*

>  - they have 256 or 512 MB memory (512 is the maximum I understand)

*double drool*

>  - none have disks :-(

annoying, buut not a show-stopper.

>  - they come with the "CSI" bus, with which I understand on can
>    cluster them together

oh man, oh man, oh man.

>  - I'm not sure how much power they suck, but it looks like they run

a lot.  :)

>  Yea, now this is the time for us Mid-Western BSD fans to get going
>  with real computers :-).

well, i'm an easty, so i don't get to share in the glory directly. :)

>  Brian Chase:
>
>  WAIT!  I'm in Indianapolis too!  Bloomington actually, but Indy's a short
>  hop away.  I can take one or two of the VAX 6000/400s and store them in my
>  basement here.
>
>  -brian.

this is cool, i'm glad there is someone to take them.  otherwise i'd be driving
out there from eastern PA to pick them up. :)

>  > This is perfect. One could go to St. Louis the other to Bloomington.
>  > The only question is, do you want to work on advancing the NetBSD port
>  > to them? This is the critical issue. In any case I now know that I
>  > will take all of them home and will leave none of them to the junk
>  > yard.
>
>  I'd be happy to work on advancing the port.  It does sound like Ragge has
>  a significant chunk of VAX 6000 work done already.  I've got some down
>  time right now, and am working on getting fast internet connectivity to my
>  home.  The main hurdle I see with the 6000 is getting it to run on 2 or
>  single phase power.  IIRC, these boxes are 3-phase.  And then I also need
>  to upgrade my power here from 100A service to at least 200A.
>
>  So there are some things I'd need to resolve first.  I can certainly help
>  with the porting effort in terms of debugging and tuning code, though I
>  don't have the knowledge to write device drivers.  I can also help by
>  providing remote access to the console.
>
>  -brian.

and we have found a winner.  this is definitely the guy you want to be giving
them to.

depending on how long he is gonna sit on them i may talk Bill Bradfor 
(sunhelp.org and others) out of his 6410 so these things had better run
NetBSD by the time i get one, so GET CRACKING!!!!!

it is such great news to see stuff rescued like this, working where i did was
so depressing watching all that cool old stuff get junked.

cheers,

-brian