[Tfug] Ping - Gordon Zaft

[Tom Ponsford]

Well if Gordon can't answer it I can.

The 4000/200 is the fasted "pure"  Qbus Vax. That is, it can use the 
same backplane
as the other Q bus microvaxes and even the PDP's. It runs at about a 
whopping 60 Mhz
It has, built into the Processor board, a SEAC 10/mb ehternet, and a 
DSSI controller. The DSSI is
a proprietary SCSI interface. and there is no support for these disks in 
NetBSD It will run VMS
and Ultrix as well as the Reno and Taho 4.2/4.4 BSD's
and of course NetBSD. Most of the Vax 4000 were sold in the large BA213 
pr dual BA23 chassis
mounted in the H9874 4' racks. I got one that I have sitting in a 
deskside BA23 case.

There is no Hardweare support for any of the graphics subsystems in 
NetBSD so they have
to be run headless. Ultrix and VMS have DECWindows do offer support for 
the QDSS graphics
boards. Kepp in mind the type of disk subsystem it has, if you are going 
to buy it. If you want
to run NetBSD you'll need another disk controller At the very least
it should have ESDI, If it has the RQDX3 and MFM disks, they are 
slooooow, and hard to find
if need replacing and have small capacity (max 170 MB). There are SCSI 
Qbus boards
but they can be really pricey over $150 recently on ebay (of course I 
have several..hehhehe)

Interesting machines, but if you are a real masochist and really twisted 
  you'll run BSD 2.9 or 2.11 on a PDP-11
with a 40MB disk, 1 meg of mem, on a 16 bit 15mhz cpu.

Tom Ponsford



Choprboy wrote:
> Hey Gordon, you listening?
> 
> A *nix question as I just had a truly sick thought and you were listed as a 
> contributer of knowledge when I googled. What do you know about the Vax 
> 4000-200? I had the idle thought of picking one up off Ebay, (just to show 
> off) and run *nix on it. Looks like NetBSD may run on it????
> 
> Can you tell me what a good vs. bad TPS is for a Vax. And what's "Vup" mean?
> 
> 
> Adrian
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