I bought my first VAX on eBay.
It was a whim really, as I had no experience with
a VAX except as an undergraduate at Purdue where
the Engineering Computer Network consisted of several
VAX-11/780s
running a home grown dual-processor version of BSD.
A paper on that system can be found
here.
The VAXstation 3100 - mercury
The machine consists of:
VAXstation 3100 Model 30
8 MB of memory, 4MB on the motherboard and an addition
4MB on a daughtercard
Disk controller board with two independent SCSI buses.
(2) RZ23 - 104MB SCSI Disk Drives
I replaced the rather small SCSI drives with two
540MB drives taken from a
Compaq PC.
(Kind of ironic I think.)
I also added a CD-ROM drive.
The CD-ROM drive facilitated the installation of NetBSD 1.5.
The computer is networked via the 10base2 Ethernet port.
It is actually quite a capable machine.
Intended as a workstation,
the VAXstation can have a keyboard, mouse, and
monitor directly connected to it.
Since I do not have these, I have set
the little switch in the back to allow it
to use the printer serial port as the console.
The VAXstation 4000 - neptune
The VS4000 is about 12 VUPS vs 2.8 for the VS3100.
The machine consists of:
VAXstation 4000 Model 60
104MB (!) of memory,
8MB on the motherboard and an additional
96MB on six 80-pin SIMMS.
SCSI Disk controller.
RZ25 - 426MB SCSI Disk Drive
Ethernet controller.
This machine, like the VS3100 is set up for a serial console.
This machine now acts as my webserver
running Apache.
The microVAX III - uranus
This machine was piece together from various boards and a
BA23 chassis.
