Applicon VAX 11/751 available

[Ethan Dicks]

On 10/18/10, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:
>
> In article <p0624081ec8e2464f5e06@[192.168.1.157]>,
>     "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh at aracnet.com> writes:
>
>> I wish I could handle such a machine, but I can't afford the space it
>> would take.  Did you happen to notice what Tape/Disk I/O devices it
>> includes?
>
> Unless they are on the front panel, it looks like just a single CPU
> cabinet.  I don't know if its complete, it wasn't particularly huge,
> so I don't know if its really all of the VAX or just inside a cabinet
> that says VAX 11/751.  I have no personal experience with such vaxen,
> so I can't say if its complete and darnit I didn't think to open the
> door and take pictures of the inside.  I was too busy wrangling my
> purchases into a trailer.

Much of the volume of an 11/750 is air.  I haven't seen an 11/751 up
close, but visualizing the innards of an 11/750 (inside which I have
spent many hours), there's a 19"-wide mounting frame in the middle,
with room on the left for a DD11DK (standard equipment) and memory
battery backup (an option I've never seen in person).

http://hampage.hu/vax/kepek/vax11-_1.jpg

It would be easy enough take the various constituent elements then
mount the blower/PSUs at the bottom of an H960, the CPU cage (CMI bus,
memory, etc) in the middle, then a BA11 somewhere in there.

The 11/751s I'm familiar with were mounted in racks in vans along with
banks of high-speed 9-track tape drives rigged to banks of geophones
for oil exploration.  Our customers would drive the VAX to near the
blast site, spool out miles of wire in various directions, plant the
charges, spin up the tape drives to 125ips and blow the charge.

I have to wonder if the market didn't define the product - it's sort
of a niche to build a mobile minicomputer that could slurp up several
MB/sec and spit it out to tape.

-ethan