I can't believe you 'just carry it into the house' all by yourself,
unless you are professional athlete.
I also have a MicroVax II in the BA123 world box and it has wheels for a
reason! The damn thing weighs 130 lbs!
I took it to the VCF East last year, never do that again. Too heavy.
When I got mine, it had only 3MB of memory and I found that I couldn't
install VMS 5.5-2 or 7.3 with that amount of memory. I put in an 8 MB
board and 11 MB total was fine.
You should make your own cable to connect the console to a PC or
terminal. Its that odd. I found the PC connection to be helpful
because you can log what you are doing.
Yes, remove the NiCad battery.
The box I got had 3 RD53 disks in it and none worked. I am using a
Viking SCSI controller and a SCSI2SD drive to boot the system.
I left the RX50 drives in and reconfigured the RQDX2 to address them.
They come in handy for getting the VMS hobbyist licenses in.
The TK50 never worked.
I put a DELQA in for networking, never tried a DEQNA.
I consider it an important machine in computing history. It allowed
scientific researchers, like myself, to get off of remote mainframes
that billed at fantastic rates and compute in a more relaxed environment.
BTW there is one in the Air & Space Museum in Washington DC.
On 1/21/2018 2:25 PM, Jules Richardson via cctech wrote:
So, I picked up (and I did just carry it into the house, and now I
hurt) a Microvax II from another list member yesterday. Cosmetically
it's a disaster (BA123 has a cracked top panel, broken wheels, missing
front door, missing right-rear panel) but internally it appears to be
complete; board wise we have:
M7606 - CPU
M7608 - 4MB ram
M9047 - grant continuity
M7504 - DEQNA ethernet
M3104 - DHV11 8-port serial
M7555 - RQDX3 disk controller
M7546 - TX50 controller
... it's got a TK50 and hard drive (no idea of capacity).
Operational status is a complete unknown, and I have absolutely zero
knowledge about these systems - so my question at this stage is what
background reading I need to be doing in terms of pre-powerup* checks,
actually hooking a console, if there's a suggested minimal config I
can use to diag the CPU, and then (assuming it gets to that point) how
to actually use the thing (I'm assuming it was running VMS rather than
Ultrix, but I don't know for sure). I'm wondering there aren't any
handy tutorials out there, alongside whatever DEC docs are recommended.
* e.g. for most machines I'd be thinking in terms of pulling all
boards/drives, hooking up a dummy load to whatever PSU rails required
it, and then at least running the PSU up in isolation first, but I
don't know to what extent this machine requires some logic in place
for the PSU to even run.
cheers
Jules
