On 11/27/2025 3:45 AM, Terri Kennedy wrote:
> Dave says this is the first time he has been in the same
> room as a working 780. Yay! And a big shout out to all of
> the volunteers who have been working to get this system run-
> ning, with work starting all the way back in 2018!
>
Yay Dave! I have had the pleasure of knowing 3 different VAX-11/780 systems. The first was the one we got at Rose-Hulman over the summer of 1980 to supplement our PDP-11/70 and 11/45. I believe the 11/45 might have been traded in as part of the VAX purchase. Things are hazy. The other two were in 1983 when I went to work at DePauw University in Greencastle, IN, just up I-70 from Terre Haute and Rose. There were one each for the academic and administrative sides of the school. I was hired on the administrative side as one of the programmers to convert their BASIC PLUS 2 applications on their PDP-11/70 to VAX BASIC on the VAX-11.
--
John H. Reinhardt
I am pleased to announce that we at LSSM have just gotten our
VAX-11/780 up and running!
Now we have to clean up the debugging and repair mess, clean up the
cabling, arrange for a permanent system disk, etc, then we will declare
it an "operational exhibit". Once that's done, it will be on HECnet
whenever it's up and running.
Of course all are welcome to come to LSSM in person and run the
machine. (feel the rumble in the floor, etc)
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
A few additions. Owen and I were working on it most recently; Matt
and Richard are not in town now. But both have put effort into it. A
lot of us have; this poor machine took a lot of work to get going.
You missed its initial troubles just before your first visit. We
picked up the machine that summer of 2017 and it was a MESS. From
memory, I hope I don't miss anything, here are the things we worked on
initially:
It had an FP785 installed; we removed it and installed baffles. (will
an FP785 even work in an 11/780??) We left the first power supply in
place in case we find an FP780 board set.
Three of its four power supplies needed bench work. The fourth was
fine. (We don't know the status of the FP780 power supply yet; we'll
look into that if we ever find an FP780.)
The console PDP-11/03 was missing, I built one from parts.
The backplane covers were missing and there were a few groups of
mashed pins. We straightened those, and found and installed the covers.
There was a UBA, but no Unibus chassis. We put together a BA11-K for
that. (We later found its original Unibus chassis.)
Later after Terri spent DAYS tediously combing out the huge mess of
board revisions (the previous owner kept swapping things around trying
to get it running) she got all that straightened out and then figured
out what WCS version we needed. Mike up at RICM was able to supply a
copy, but their disk imaging system was down so he just sent us the
whole box of disks. We imaged them and sent them back, and I pieced
together what should look like an original distribution 11/780 console disk.
This was a big thing for me personally too. All my life I've been a
"DEC guy"; I've had VAXen at home since I was 20 years old, which was 36
years ago, almost as long as I've had PDP-8s and PDP-11s. My first
"real" industry job was as an admin on a set of VAXen, one of which was
an 11/750. But until last night, I had never been in the same room as a
running 11/780. It hit me deeply and felt really, really good.
And it was fitting for Owen; he was at the console during the first
complete boot, and yesterday was his 65th birthday. A few of us took
him out for tasty Indian food right after that boot.
-Dave
On 11/27/25 04:45, Terri Kennedy wrote:
> On 2025-11-27 02:56, Keith Halewood wrote:
>> Great news. I hope you'll be publishing some pictures (perhaps before,
>> during after) of the restoration on the website?
>
> There aren't a lot of pictures (at least I didn't take many).
>
> A lot of it was just basic mechanical stuff - fixing a seized
> spindle and decayed drive belt on the floppy drive and then im-
> aging a number of floppies with the console software and a bunch
> of diagnostic discs. Dave did all of that.
>
> Then there was an interesting project to come up with outlet
> strips to plug all of the individual component AC power cords
> into, since there wasn't an L21-30R receptacle there at the time
> to plug the single "official" power cord into. This will be ad-
> dressed now that it is a functional exhibit.
>
> After reseating some cards, Dave and I were able to use a
> cheat I knew of to get past the console complaints about mis-
> matched hardware and we got the first ">>>" prompt in over a
> decade. At that point, "BOOT DU0" would actually go initialize
> the disk controller and turn on the port select on the drive,
> but not go past that point. At that point, we knew we at least
> had a VAX, although a very sick one.
>
> At that point, Dave imaged some other console discs and I
> then edited the contents using RT-11 on another system (the
> LSI-11/03 that controls the VAX runs a very modified version
> of RT-11).
>
> Next, there was an assortment of boards which were neither
> compatible with each other, nor with the console microcode.
> I discovered the Museum had nearly a complete 780 board set as
> well as some 785 boards, and spent several days with all of
> the boards and DEC's official "VAX-11/780 & VAX-11/782 Revis-
> ion Control" document to bring the system up to revision 8.B
> which is the newest 780 revision. I then spent a few more
> days weeding out bad boards.
>
> At that point, the system went from saying "Help me!" (see
> the first photo) to actually booting to the VMS version banner
> for the first time in many, many years (second photo) but then
> hanging.
>
> Dave, Owen, Richard and Matt P (apologies if I missed any-
> one, I'm doing this from memory) then discovered that I'd
> missed a bad board, which caused "console transit done" in-
> terrupts to not be seen by the VAX. This past evening, they
> got the 780 to boot, first NetBSD and then VMS. It is also
> now passing diagnostics.
>
> Now the work begins to neaten things up, get it the power
> cabling it wants, and configure the console floppy so that
> it can boot VMS, Ultrix-32 or NetBSD, depending on what sort
> of demo will be given.
>
> Dave says this is the first time he has been in the same
> room as a working 780. Yay! And a big shout out to all of
> the volunteers who have been working to get this system run-
> ning, with work starting all the way back in 2018!
>
> Th last picture is the inside of the 780 in all of its
> glory. It isn't on in this picture because the air baffles
> need to be in place in front of the cards to keep the CPU
> from overheating and going into thermal shutdown. So this
> picture was "posed" to show the board set, before putting
> all of the air baffles back in place.
>
> _______________________________________________
> HECnet mailing list -- hecnet(a)lists.dfupdate.se
> To unsubscribe send an email to hecnet-leave(a)lists.dfupdate.se
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
Hi folks, has anyone here used a Lantronix ETS-series or similar
terminal server for LAT connections to RSX? We're having a strange
problem at LSSM and could use some info.
Thanks,
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
