VAXen at home

[Mr Ian Primus]

--- William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote:

> > I agree that the custom gate arrays make the
> 11/750 unrepairable
> > (except for raiding parts), but I still think it's
> a good compromise
> > between size and performance, for the VAX-11 line.
> 
> Has anyone here actually ever come across an 11/750
> failure caused by
> one of the gate arrays? They are remarkably reliable
> machines.

I found my 11/750 in a dusty corner of a warehouse...
They do seem to be pretty reliable, after a lot of
cleaning (it was filthy!) it powered up and sorta
worked. The RDM board is bad, but that's not required
to get the machine to run. It appears to be failure of
the RAM on the RDM board, actually. Which of course is
soldered to the board, and there is no diagnostic
routine to find out which chip is bad...

So, yeah, it seems like it's a fairly robust critter.
Years of service, then years of storage in an unheated
warehouse, and it still works. But then again, this is
only personal experience...

-Ian