From: Michael Sokolov <sokolov@alpha.CES.CWRU.Edu>

<   I don't remember being insulting. (I sincerely apologize if I was.) A
<for "working with vaxen longer than your [sic] alive", I'm approximately 
<the same age as 780 (being born on 8-JUL-1979), so that's doubtful.

You were.  You lucked out as my first vax account was 1980.  Then again 
I'd been running pdp-11s and building hardware on the side for them for 
few years by then.  However at almost 19 you are lucky but, don't alienate
us fossels that have been around the track in the industry neary twice 
that.

<   I apologize... The name Allison doesn't immediately sound feminine to
<me, but it doesn't sound masculine either, so I was avoiding calling you

The underlying assumption hardware=male.  That's about predjudice too.
I'm old enough to have heard a dept chairman suggesting nursing or 
'other more suitable' career path.

<  But you have to agree that the way an OS treats the hardware does tel
<you something about the hardware itself, even if you don't use that
<particular OS. 

I don't agree with that.  If anything it tells me a lot about the 
designers philosophy prior to that hardware.  VAX was aimed at the 
supermini market, then after some time we have these little VAXen 
(730, 72x, MV-I and later) emerging and changing the rules.  A lot 
of the little VAX  oddities can be better attributed to the previous 
unibus vaxen and the ubiqitious Q-bus PDP-11s the vax hardware was 
ported to.  Much of small VAX history is a result of the PDP-11 hardware 
already in place.

<BTW, I wonder what do you have to say in response to my la
<posting on the subject (the ~30 KB one from 31-JAN-1998). If you don't ha
<it, tell me and I'll send you another copy. Your response would help me
<better understand what's going on and eventually contribute to UNIX BabyV
<support.

Deleted, to much, too hard to read.  Leave out the rants about DEC 
marketing and the feds as neither are important to writing good code or 
getting to accurate information about the actual construction.  

If you haven't figured it out from 84ish to 92ish DEC internally was a 
bunch of often reorganized fifedoms and each had their own marketing.  
So each new baby vax was influenced by sometimes disparate marketing and 
engineering decisions.  What does that mean, the design rules for VS2k 
were different from 3100 and they were tasked different from the rest of 
the vax groups as DEC was uncertain where and what they were doing. So 
you have a basic cpu archetecture plagued by diverse hardware support, 
divergent address assignments and design rules. All annoyingly similar 
but just enough different.  Those oddities lead to things like the 
3100m76 a really nice machine having no Ultrix support.

There are amazingly good sources for VAX hardware and software design.
The VMS orange or gray wall and the other more scarce DEC stds 1->201.
DEC standards are the basic internal hard and fast rules for how to do 
everything from a outside corrigated box lable to what a VAX is and must 
do.  Other standards like Q-bus, MSCP, MASSBUS and other useful items 
are encased there.  DEC stds obviously are not public and a full set is
a wall of binders as well.  But most of the important parts are burried 
in tech manuals for disks, tapes, display systems and the like.  If you 
read enough of them the whole picture is available.  Most of those are so 
old that unless scanned by someone they will not be on the net.

<   I have recently gained access to TK50 tapes with Ultrix versions 3.0,
<3.1, 4.0, and 4.2. I wonder if you or someone else could tell me what ar
<the main differences between them. Which versions support NFS? (I hope a

Before 4.0 in my mind it's below the event horizon.  4.0 and later is a 
good base as far as I'd work with it.

<ones and if yes, in what version. Also since the media I have happen to b
<TK50 tapes, I need to know their format. How many tape files (sections o
<tape separated by physical tape marks) are there? What is the block size

This is better dealt with in the other vax groups.  I don't have that 
detail or tapes with it on it. I'd bet the bootable tape (1st one)
has a minimal image for the boot device and supports what ever is 
resonable for that device. Distribution for Ultrix was (varied over time)
1600bpi magtape, 6250bpi magtape, RL02 carts, RA60, TK50 and likely TK70
later cdrom as well.  No doubt all were different.  If they are actual
installation kit tapes the first will be bootable and have an install 
shell.

<   Where have you got this idea from? You are accusing me of being
<insulting and others are accusing me of being prejudicial, but here you a
<being insulting and prejudicial. 

Tough. By time I'd reached that point in the some unresonable amount 
of text my patience for the noise was quite limited.  That hasn't 
improved.  

Allison
<I have participated in the design of a few
<hardware devices, and I have read tons of paper about hardware.

How complex?  A simple PIO port hooked to a bus from a PC, caching disk 
controllers, a cpu core or maybe a system.  I likely have old projects 
in my junkbox that would make your eyes water.  As to reading tons of 
paper, good.  No doubt many here have contributed to the origination of 
those tons. I've only written a few CPU manuals and some of my better 
works are enshrined in some dusty archive as a design spec, or technical 
description.  I'd severly doubt your not impressed with that. By the same 
token nor am I of your comment of what you've read.  It's unimportant and 
ego basting. 

Results speak for themselves and right no this newsgroups goal is 
PORT-VAX or better said improving the quality of NetBSD to a reliable 
robust OS for VAX platforms.  That said there is a demand for a free 
unencumbered OS for vax systems as there out there and being junked.  
That last part is unfortunate as there are plenty of people that can 
use small VAX level of performance effectively if presented with a good 
multitasking multiuser OS at an acceptable price.

<   I have never proposed any convention, so I don't know what you are
<referring to, but if I were to give a definition for "busless", I would u
<something like what you are saying. BTW, what's 4004?

The convention predates you and you misused it.  The 4004 was the intel
4bit(data path) micro that really was the first of a kind in 1971. It 
spawned the 4040, 8008, 8080 and later.

Allison