The Digital VAX-11/780 superminicomputer

Description

MoBATCH has two VAX-11/780 computers on loan. One is working, and the other is missing a few parts, and is not currently functional.

They are composed of double-wide main rack, and a normal width I/O rack. The main rack has the front end processor with floppy drive, system power supplies, main CPU backplane, memory backplane, and high speed I/O on the system. The whole rack as configured weighs about 900lb.

The second narrow rack contains the UNIBUS I/O cabinet (BA11), and peripheral contollers.

Picture

Specifications

The main system rack contains:

• One KA780 CPU with FP780 option - the first VAX CPU, and which defined the “VAX Unit of Performance” (VUP) which other VAX systems were compared against. This was one of the first virtual memory enabled UNIX systems.
• 24MB of system ram in a MS780-E chassis, upgraded from 12MB that it came.
• Two DW780 backplanes to connect UNIBUS peripherals to. One is currently unused
• One (unused) RH780 backplane with modules to connect Massbuss peripherals
• The SBI terminator
• The TOD clock battery/psu
• The LSI-11 (aka PDP-11/03) system with RX01 8 inch floppy drive that is used as a system console. The console serial port on the LSI-11 is used as the VAX system console, and the RX01 floppy drive is used to load the LSI-11 console program, Writeable Control Store (WCS) patches, boot program (VMB.EXE and BOOT43), and to load off-line diagnostics. The QBUS from the LSI-11 connects to the VAX CPU’s Console Interface Board (CIB) which has boot roms and several I/O registers to connect the LSI-11 and VAX.

The secondary rack contains:

• UNIBUS BA11 enclosure with: ** Emulex UC18 SCSI controller (MSCP) ** Emulex PERTEC tape drive controller (TMSCP) ** Digital DMF32 DMA-based serial/parallel perhiperal interface ** DEC (DEUNA/DELUA) Unibus 10Mbps Ethernet controller.
• Fujitsu M2444 PERTEC 9-track tape drive, which supports 1600 BPI and 6250 BPI format tapes
• A SCSI encolsure containing: ** One IBM CD-ROM drive, which is reported to the sytem as an RRD40 ** Three Seagate ST15150N 3.5", 4GB narrow SCSI disks, each of which holds an OS: OpenVMS 7.2, NetBSD 1.6.1, and 4.3BSD

System History

These systems were purchased from ebay in 2005. They were in deep storage after having been retired by a company that did GIS mapping for utility companies. They were paired with Intergraph drafting tables to do the work, but I was not able to save those.

Around 2007-2010 the working system was connected to the internet over an AT&T T1 internet connection, by the company “UseOurs.com”, Which was founded by Patrick Finnegan and Jeremy Nethercutt to attempt to provide access to obsolete systems, but the project stalled out.

As seen on TV!

One of the two systems was filmed running for the Netflix mini-series American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders.

Other events

One system was displayed at Vintage Computer Festival Midwest (VCFMW) 4 in 2008 at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
It has also been displayed at multiple VCFMW events since the event moved to the Chicago suburbs. Most recently, it was displayed at the SC25 conference in St. Louis, Missouri, in the booth (3328) put on by MoBATCH.

Donation information

These computers are on loan from Patrick Finnegan’s personal collection.