On April 30, you wrote:
> 1) These would each make a nice NetBSD machine, right?

  Right.  An RD53 is a little small, but heck, they're dead, right? :)

> 2) where can I get very cheap replacements for my dead RD-53's?

  The RD53 is a Micropolis 1325, 71mb.  The RD54 is a Maxtor XT2190,
159mb.  You'd be much better off with the RD54, of course.  If I were
you, I'd scour the newsgroups and go to hamfests.  71mb & 159mb drives
aren't worth much money these days, so you might get lucky.

> 3) If I happen to get a drive or two, what are my chances of getting
> them formatted, etc?

  You'll need the DEC field service tape for that, or pick up a
MicroVAX-2000 (or VAXstation-2000) "lunchbox" vax to use as a
formatter.  The last one of these I bought cost me a whopping fifty
bucks so it's worth it.  The '2000 has a formatter in ROM.

> btw:  does NetBSD run X on these boxes yet?  or is it in the plans?  without 
> knowing too much about them, their big displays (and mice) seem to make them 
> ideal graphical terminals.

  Not yet.  The vcb01 is 1024x864, single-plane (monochrome) and it's
pretty simple.  The vcb02 is very nice, IMHO, and can be built out as
a 4- or 8-plane framebuffer and will run greyscale or color,
1024x864.  It's also reasonably fast, having a few processors on it to
handle graphics operations.

  The 4.4 vcb drivers should be able to move into NetBSD pretty
easily, but noone's done it yet.  I'd do it myself but I don't yet
know enough about device drivers.  The real problem is the fact that
MIT removed vcb support from X a couple of releases ago.  R4 was the
last to have it, I think....or maybe R5.

  It's a long shot, but I think it shouldn't be too hard to make it
work, though.  The X driver interface has changed a lot, but it
shouldn't be that bad to merge the old code in.  I might try that
after someone does the device driver for NetBSD.


                       -Dave