>From: Johnny Billquist <bqt@update.uu.se>

>Last time I looked at our DEC-2060, it didn't say "VAX" anywhere. :-)

Yeah yeah yeah, OK I was just pointing out that motors aren't the *only*
thing DEC ever used 3-phase for.

And, what was the name of that KL shop in Ontario(?) which used to paint
all their KLs blue/white so that visiting customers would assume they
were VAXes?

>But you are correct in that in some machines DEC have built, the power
>supplies really require 3-phase. But that's only as far as the ps
>goes. Beyond that, there is no need. So you could hook into the actual
>feeds to the machine instead, using your own PS. But that is beyond my
>knowledge anyway. :-)

As Eric said, it is one hell of a power supply, not the kind of thing your
average Joe would solder up over the weekend.  And the weird ECL voltages
aren't easy to find in an off-the-shelf monster switcher PS.

I used to fantasize about using a bank of car batteries to drive the
regulators directly, then my KL could at least run for a half hour or
however long the batteries would go between charges.  A friend of mine
used to be on a team that was building an electric race car, and once
when they were upgrading to a new kind of batteries, he offered to make
me a deal on their piles of old ones, but I wussed out and ended up
giving the machine away.  Probably a good thing, RCS/RI is a much better
home for that poor old machine.

Re NetBSD on a PDP-10 -- well it won't just plug 'n chug just because GCC
is/will be available for it, the PDP-10 is wildly different from typical
UNIX architectures in a lot of ways.  But anything's possible, and it'd
sure be ... interesting.

Keep in mind that anyone who ports UNIX to a PDP-10 will be subject to
tarring and feathering by the regular PDP-10 crowd.

John Wilson
D Bit