Evan said it was in service until a couple of months ago, so it should power up OK, if it could all be electrically and mechanically stitched back together carefully. The question is probably, could they afford the power bill? We have a bunch of Crays and CDCs at the Computer History Museum, and if they were operational, we'd probably have to take up a special very-large-hat-passing collection just to pay the power bill for the multiple,- multi-ton refrigeration units (at least one was about a seven-ton unit, IIRC)! Then, there's the problem of replacement parts for when, not if, things fail, not to mention the labor expertise and availability. It's one thing to replace discrete transistors in our IBM 1401, but, it's quite another to desolder and yank various little black rectangles off extremely dense circuit boards without destroying anything else ... and then solder in a replacement, if you can find one not already firmly attached to another board with another kind of failure. That assumes that problems can even be isolated, although at least more modern systems tend to have self-diagnostic capabilities, at least above a certain level of functionality, or lack thereof.
On Sat, Nov 10, 2018 at 3:26 AM Pontus Pihlgren via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > That is a behemoth!! > > Did you ger that huge powerforming thingy that goes > with it? > > Are you crazy enough to atempt a power-up? > > /P > > On Wed, Nov 07, 2018 at 09:55:07PM -0500, Evan Koblentz via cctalk wrote: > > The VCF museum took delivery of a VAX 9440 today. > > > > It arrived in two 28-foot trailers. Here's our forklift driver > > beginning to unload the first truck: > > > > > https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E-Q5xrsYXyjrZEZh92xIBhlStvvNUcRV/view?usp=sharing > > > > Here's a teaser picture of the main cabinet: > > > > > https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bEpSMzBEeOvuDnzPQ9Npc7iYmDhjZq8c/view?usp=sharing > > > > The full system is 30-40 feet long when it's all set up! It is in > > pristine condition and was in service at a defense contractor until > > a couple of months ago. > > > > Rumor has it that we arranged for another one to land in Dave > > McGuire's Large Scale Systems Museum collection, and a third to be > > with Bob Roswell's System Source collection. :) Perhaps they'll > > post updates too! >
