Digital Equipment Corporation MicroVAX II

Specifications

dumpy

This was the first VAX that I was given and it's an absolute beauty! It remained dormant for many years as it came without any hard drives. It originally had the M7164 and M7165 KDA50 SDI disk adaptor card set installed but I don't have any RA disks (maybe one day) so the cards were removed and safely popped into an anti-static bag. I was too preoccupied with other things at the time and then later I received the VAXserver 3800 which left this machine on the to-do list.

Fast forward to 2024 where I had all but given up installing 4.3BSD Quasijarus onto the VAXserver 3800 from tape, both onto one of the DSSI drives or a SCSI drive connected to the Dilog SQ739 controller. It ran well from a QBone card I have but I wanted it on a physical mechanical drive. As a last hurrah, I did a clean install with the Simh VAX emulator to a virtual RA72 disk and then wrote the image to a 1GB SCSI drive with a Linux machine. Surprisingly, the 3800 booted from the disk but the startup would hang with a uda0: init step 1 failed error. I was afraid that there may have been a compatibility issue with the Dilog SCSI controller but wanted to try one last thing.

I moved the SCSI controller and disk to the MicroVAX II and started everything up. As before, it found the bootblock and booted up the kernel but it didn't hang when initalising the disk controller. It continued on and eventually I was greeted by a login prompt. Everything seemed to work fine and I considered it a success. It also gave the MicroVAX II a purpose as running NetBSD with 16M of RAM would be pushing it and the other VAX was already running it. So, now this is my 4.3BSD machine and I couldn't be happier.

Now that I've been running 4.3BSD Quasijarus on real hardware, I am astonished as to how zippy it is. The 3800 with NetBSD is just sooo slow in comparison and its performance is just over four times greater than the MicroVAX II. It's a testament to how lightweight the operating system is. Even compiling a kernel took around half an hour. I have also installed some third party software under /usr/local including a bunch of GNU stuff like gcc. As a result, this has been the most enjoyable to use out of my two VAXen.

Below is a list of the cards installed in it.