Digital VAXstation 4000-VLC (Aka M30) ===================================== Nick/Codename: PVAX2/VLC Year made: 1991/1992 CPU: KA48 (System On a Chip) @25/50Mhz (40ns cycle time) and 6kb Cache on chip Enclosure: BA10A (Literally the size of a pizza box high and width) Performance: 6 VUP(s) (VAX Units of Performance relative to an 11/780 from 1977) RAM: 8..24mb of low profile 72pin 36bit ECC simms. Weight: ~5kgs ..it's mostly plastic. Power Usage: 105Watt peak at startup. Less during operation Graphics: 8bit (256 colours). No graphics in NetBSD. VMS and Ultrix only. Video out is a 3w3 video similar to old 3xx series RS/6000's Expandability: More RAM upto the max of 24mb or bigger disk. It has no qbus or turbo channel so forget expanding. External disk or tape or CDROM via external scsi-2 50-way centronics. O/S: These things were made and designed to run VMS. They were originally designed as a dumb Xterminal but there was a need for a low-cost replacement for the VAXStation-2000 and this little system was the bunny. It's disk IO in anything other than VMS is appaulingly slow (~600kb/sec for NetBSD or nearly 3x that under VMS). Ultrix was not officially supported on these things but it can be coaxed to run netbooted and using a serial console. General: Ideal for a hobbiest that wants to get into VMS or if you want a low-powered, small quiet webserver that won't get hammered with too many connections they're great. I know someone running one as a shell box for VMS porting of GNU OSS products, email and web serving to support half a dozen people. They're no race horse but do make an excellent first VAX, or VAXcluster controller. They're cheap, easy to find (lots of them!), and cheap to ship because of their size/weight. Sources: NetBSD documentation website: http://www.netbsd.org Chucks house of VAX: http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/computers/vaxen/vax4000-vlc.html Images: Pentax Optio-60 with thumb-over-flas-mod (tm)