I tell you there is something spooky about wishing for things and then 
having them sorta pop up.

We had this brief discussion about if we just had an undamaged 4000/90 
flash image we could "repair" the existing damaged ones. But 4000/90's, 
while not exactly rare, are rarely cheap. So on a whim I checked the local 
liquidator and they had one sitting in their sealed bid lots section and it 
had lots of stickers indicating DKA300 (sys) etc so it was not a parts 
donor. Well $37 bucks later and it was mine. Picked it up today.

Turns out it is actually a 4000/90A rather than a 4000/90. Further, it has 
a couple of RZ26's (1 GB each) ,a licensed copy of VMS still installed 
(user data is wiped so someone was "nice" about decommissioning it), and 
128MB of RAM. Interestingly there is some program that runs at startup that 
attempts to measure the 'vup rating' of the platform on which its operating 
(then it checks a license) and prints out that "This platform rate is 27.0 
VUPS, license check ... OK!" I'm wondering if I can extract this part and 
run it on some other VAXen.

Anyway, so I've got a couple of interesting questions:
	1) Will the FLASH image for the 4000/90A work with the 4000/90? I presume 
that the clock boost is the only difference.
	2) I need a VMS program that can dump the flash into a binary file (I can 
probably cons up one on NetBSD to write it out.) I've got licenses for all 
the compilers so source code is ok (even COBOL ;-)
	3) While $37 (actually $45 w tax etc) isn't a huge investment risk, I'd 
like to figure out if there is some way to "test" this without actually 
writing the flash. After all, its a pain in the but to re-flash via a 
remote pod.

--Chuck