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Micro Vax two project

Q

Qbus

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Picked up the Micro Vax Two this last weekend and have it home now. The system was last used by the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan and they have removed all the drives. It came in the rack with all the cabling, brake out panels for the terminals and a bunch of additional drive cables but none of the drives themselves. The rack has the CDC BY3A6 open reel tape transport and then the BA-23 Micro Vax frame and is populated with one KA-630(M-7607) CPU, two MS-630 Memory cards, a Emulex SU0310402 communications card, a Emulex TC02/TS11 CDC Tape Controller card (TU0210401) and a Emulex CU0210402 hard drive controller card with four ten foot cables but no drives for them to connect too. The bottom end has one M-3106 (DZQ-11), an M-7555 RQDX3 disk controller and an M-7546 for the TK 50 drive up front. Someone also stole the AC power controller from the base of the rack but fortunately I have a spare so no problem replacing that. Plan to have everything cleaned up and together tonight and attach a terminal and run the system up. Think the big problems now are going to be locating a RD51 or RD52 MFM style hard drive to connect to the RQDX3 and then deciding on the operating system.

Ray F/AKA QBus
 

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I'm guessing one of the Emulex cards is an UC07 or UC08 SCSI disk controller. SCSI disk or SCSI2SD is the way forward! Photos?

Or it could be and Emulex SC03 SMD Controller RH11 Emulation for RM03/RM05/RM80/RP05/RP06!!
 
That tape drive looks very much like the CDC Keystone drives, rebadged with AT&T logo's, that we had on all of our 3B30D's that were either Administrative Modules for the #5ESS switch or Attached Processors for the #1AESS. I think I might have had to fix one trouble in probably 20 years of working with them. The onboard diagnostics are great.
 
The Emulex disk controller card has three plugs and three cables, one huge multi-conductor that’s all twisted pairs and two smaller cables that are some weird flat ribbons that are real thin. Don’t think its SCSI
The clock was a present from the wife; it’s not birds but fish. They splash on the hour.
 
Looks like the Emulex card is SMD controller for the like of CDC 9762 drives etc. :( An RD54 for the RQDX3 will be very expensive if you can get your hands on one. Getting a SCSI controller my be the best way to go in my opinion.
 
Hi All;

QBus, Thank You for straightening me out, Yes, on a second Look they do look like Fish and Not Birds..
Up to a month or two ago I Never Heard of these Specialty type of clocks..
I wonder what other types they have ??

THANK YOU Marty
 
Marty said:
Hi All;

QBus, Thank You for straightening me out, Yes, on a second Look they do look like Fish and Not Birds..
Up to a month or two ago I Never Heard of these Specialty type of clocks..
I wonder what other types they have ??

THANK YOU Marty
Click to expand...

A friend of mine has one with cars on it, thus engine/exhaust sounds on the hour.
 
Nice looking system. Appears to be very clean. Wish I could help with a drive for you.
 
I still have not powered the system up yet. Have finished all the cleaning and preliminary power up test but the question that keeps coming up in my mind is about what to do for a system disk. The system has a M7555 (RQDX-3) MFM controller card and looking at the book for the card it looks like it can address RD51, RD52 or and RD53 MFM hard drive. Have seen that there are some RD53 80 Mb disks listed on EBay but they are big money. The RD53 appears to be a MICROPOLIS 901414-10-2A drive and am wondering if there is any Seagate equal? , also with the RD52 being 30 Mb wonder if it’s a Seagate ST-1100? Any ideas?
 
Qbus said:
also with the RD52 being 30 Mb wonder if it’s a Seagate ST-1100? Any ideas?
Click to expand...

Both of my RD52s were Quantum Q540 drives. There may have also been another drive used by DEC for the RD52 (can't remember anymore).

RD54 (Maxtor XT-2190 IIRC) should also work with an RQDX3.

I like the idea of the MFM emulator, too, rather than trying to keep real MFM drives running.
 
I agree with NOT trying to use a real MFM drive. They're so expensive, yet so old - how long would it continue to work?
Pete
 
I have a three RL drives that are up and running, several spare set of drives for parts and have no fears using them. The MFM drives are not as easy or forgiving to work on but think the older drives may be more tolerable of the occasional operation that I would be asking; also some small amount of work can be carried out on the old drives as opposed to more modern ones. With regards to my systems I have been looking into paper tape for the 11 systems being it’s very repairable and am giving lots of thought to using the tape drive as much as possible on the VAX, and have not completely ruled out the idea of getting rid of the VAX hardware and going to something like a 11/83 so the requirements for size of the operating system and software are easier to deal with.
Once you get to the point of virtual drives then how long before you start thinking it’s an unacceptable risk running the processors and other hardware and then you get to the point of running a virtual system. Nothing wrong with that but for me I like to run the original hardware and drives. The challenge of the large hardware and arcane drive systems is why I do it, once I get the systems up and running spend little time using them. But that’s just me and the way I do things. Think if it was someone wanting to build a system to be dependable or always online there would be no question on using emulators and mimicking functions in software.


Ray F
 
Very good Ray, well spoken.
For myself, I suppose I draw the line at whether I feel I can repair it, and if using it is going to shorten its life. A disk drive HDA will have a point of no return someday, whether it's powered up or not.
I agree with you that running a virtual system takes the fun out of it. Why have any old HW at all?
And I also agree with you that I tend to do a project "just to prove that I can do it", but then I put it on the shelf to collect dust (witness my RX11 and RXV11 emulator projects from 10-12 years ago - once I used it to boot RT-11 on my 11/05, I didn't do much else with it).
Pete
 
The RQDX3 also support the Seagate ST225 and ST251. I have one of each od these, I don't have an O/S on either of them and I'm not sure what O/S is small enough to run on one. I have XXDP installed on both of mine. The are not very expensive from epay.
 
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