I built a kernel using Jan 18. sources successful, i.e.
   netbsd was built.
   But it doesn't recognize my Adaptec 1742 which happens to be the 
   only controller I have for use with this machine and 32 meg.

Are you sure it doesn't recognize the controller, or just doesn't find
any disks on it?  There was a short-lived bug in the driver that would
cause it to get repeated (false) UNIT ATTENTION errors and fail to
find any devices.  This is fixed (and in fact the code is running
quite well on two of `our' machines).

You should see this patch RSN if you SUP.