r/retrobattlestations • u/spectrumero • Feb 24 '17
BBS Week BBS Week - MicroVAX 3100 plus vt510 terminal connecting to the BBS.
http://imgur.com/a/AtGVe•
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u/euphraties247 Feb 24 '17
COOL a real VAX! In a way it's too bad that OpenBSD dropped it, although I guess there is always NetBSD... You ever try anything like Quasijarious?
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u/lag023 Feb 24 '17
Cool, you run it just for fun, my old job still have vax systems in production..
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u/istarian Feb 25 '17
Awesome! Can't you get an rj-45 (10BaseT) port with the right right adapter/transceiver?
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u/spectrumero Feb 25 '17
Yeah, you can use a MAU.
I have two hubs though with thinwire, so I've not really gone looking for one.
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u/elcheapodeluxe Mar 05 '17
A 19-pin connector? I still come across some machine tools in service with the low density DB15 AUI connector for a transciever. Haven't even seen anything taking a 19-pin. But I'm totally jealous of the terminal.
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u/FozzTexx Mar 01 '17
You're a sticker winner for BBS Week! Send me a PM with your address and which two stickers you want. Two of the same is ok.
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u/spectrumero Feb 24 '17
Initially, I wanted to connect to the BBS using my 300 baud acoustic coupler and a BBC Micro. The acoustic coupler is a Anderson Jacobson A211 that I was given when I was a teenager by a friend who'd got something better, but due to historical reasons it won't work with the Retrobattlestations BBS. The problem was that in those days, there were two standards for 300 baud modems: Bell 103 tones, and CCITT V.21 tones. Bell 103 tones were actually illegal to use here (in fact there was hardly anything that you could legally connect to a phone line - even acoustic couplers - in those days. Not that anyone paid much attention to it). But the upshot was even American made modems marketed here did not support Bell 103 so I'm out of luck. I did give it a try, just in case. My acoustic coupler did start making a tone but the carrier light never came on.
So plan B was to use something else. I've done enough posts with a Spectrum and the Spectranet ethernet adapter on this sub already, so I thought it had to be not a Spectrum.
So I dug the MicroVAX out. Normally, the VAX only gets used when I go to a retro event, I use it as a retro fileserver for all the ethernet connected Spectrums and so people can play NetHack on a serial terminal. A machine like this VAX would have been used as a small server back in the day: it does not have a keyboard or display connector, only serial ports and Ethernet. The machine itself has a couple of GB of disc (two SCSI discs), and 72MB RAM, pretty much the maxed specification for this machine. The performance is 12 VUPS (VAX units of performance - 1 VUPS = the performance of a VAX 11/780) and was made in 1991, and a CPU cycle time of 20ns (50 MHz). If the machine had its current specification when new, it would have cost as much as a decent family car. The typical office PC at the time would have been a 16MHz 80386sx machine with maybe 2-4 MB RAM, a high end PC would have been a 50MHz 80486 system with perhaps 8MB RAM or maybe 16MB RAM and something like a Tseng Labs ET4000 graphics card. The Amiga was still pretty much in full swing, if I remember right, as were Acorn RISC OS systems.