> Robert Armstrong <b...@jfcl.com> wrote:
> I have a running 8350 [...] I've always wondered if the limitation to two
> CPUs was purely for testing and support reasons -
> it doesn't seem that there's any reason why you could not plug in three or
> even more CPU cards.
By the way of the anecdotes, Bernd Ulmann who owns a huge (likely the largest
in the world by now) collection of VAX/Alpha equipment (a shed filled with
various models of VAXes, including 7000, 6000 vector, 8000 series, MicroVAXes,
VAXstations, HSCs, star couplers, RA disks, you name it), including the
machines that were never released or were released in a singular quantities
(like 32-processor Alpha), owns VAX 8330 (?) -- or anyway a 3-CPU 8000 series
machine.
The machine was being designed by DEC Germany, and was intended to be a
3-processor edition.
However it was generating spurious bus resets and DEC engineering was never
able to figure why.
Thus the machine was never releases commercially and the only engineering
sample had been sitting for a good while in DEC/Compaq engineering storage
before being dumped to Bernd's collection.
* * *
I also cannot help but remember the other story Bernd had, about that
32-processor Alpha. It was special-ordered by some German company, but while
Compaq Germany was being putting it together, the company that ordered the
machine went out of business. So Compaq held the machine for a while but
several years later dumped it to Bernd as well. When I was visiting Bernd some
years ago, he still never turned the machine on (unlike most of the others in
his collection), since the power draw would put the lights out in the whole
village where the shed resides... he was still figuring out the power feed.
* * *
And then, my favorite of Bernd's tales, is about the machine that had the most
exotic fate: it was a MicroVAX III that was being shipped from the Western
Germany to the USSR in the late 1980's, and German customs intercepted the
shipping (infrequently, but occasionally they would succeeded in that). While
German authorities were trying to figure out what to do with the intercepted
shipping, the customs put it in the warehouse, where it sat for the next 20
years. In the late 2000's German customs noticed that this box had been sitting
there for 20 years, and it was apparently the time to do something about it
after all. The box ended up at Bernd's barn. Bernd opened it, powered up this
MicroVAX and installed VMS on it -- it worked flawlessly.
Few months after learning this story from Bernd (he told it to me while
pointing at that MicroVAX) I was at my old VAXcluster room about 2 hours from
Moscow (machines were long gone by then), taking out the old tapes -- in the
hopes of finding some retro-interesting software/files there. My friend and I
took select tapes from the storage shelves down to the building entrance, but
we needed to transport them to another building on site located a mile away,
where the tapes could be kept temporarily before smuggling them out beyond the
secure perimeter. Tapes were bulky and heavy, and carrying them this distance
would have been quite an exercise, so my friend called his colleague, who had a
car pass to the site. His colleague came in the car, and while we were loading
the tapes into the trunk, he looked at those tapes recorded 20 to 25 years ago
and said:
– I kind of doubt you'll be able to read them.
In response I told him a story about Bernd's MicroVAX that sat for 20 years in
the box and then worked just fine.
To which my friend's colleague responded with an instinctive exclamation,
without an instant of thinking:
– Of course! What could have ever happened to it?! It's a VAX!
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