XMI goodies?

[Andrew Back]

On Fri, 9 Mar 2007, Doc Shipley wrote:

>> I haven't the foggiest idea what XMI gear is :-)
>
>  It's one of DEC's more arcane I/O busses.  I've only ever seen it attached 
> to VAX6000, DEC7000 and VAX7000, and DEC10000 systems.  I don't know if any 
> other systms used it.

I used to work on VAX7000s at British Gas and one day my boss decided we 
needed another to test out patches and that it had to be a 7000 to 
match production. So I duly found a secondhand machine and arranged for 
it to be installed. But he wasn't prepared to pay for HSJ controllers 
etc, and IIRC we ended up converting one bus to another so we could then 
attach a DSSI adapter and small shelf with a couple of disks in. And for 
some reason this config was *incredibly* slow to boot as a result. I 
remember developers calling 30 mins afer loss of service to see when it would 
be back up and saying "Sorry, it's still crashing" (dumping).

Was a 10000 essentially a 7000 with tons of batteries in for UPS, or the 
VAX that could be reconfigured into an Alpha?

Andrew