[Info-vax] Attaching an actual 3.5" floppy drive to SIMH-VAX RXV21 device?

[Doug Phillips]

On 8/14/2012 5:28 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2012-08-14 22:09:08 +0000, Johnny Billquist said:
>
>> On 2012-08-14 16:10, Steven Schweda wrote:
>>>> Are you sure it was a VAXStation? [...]
>>>
>>> Did I say "VAXstation"?  Oops.  More likely a MicroVAX I.
>>> (Not that it matters much here.)  It was a BA23 box.
>>>
>>>> [...] We are talking VAXStation here.  That's a desktop
>>>> pizza box. Not a QBUS system.  No where to put an
>>>> RQDX-anything and no room for a drive the size of the RX50.
>>>
>>> No.  "VAXstation" is not equivalent to "VAXstation 31xx".
>>> There were several different Q-bus VAXstation system types.
>>> (Roughly one per MicroVAX system type.)
>>
>> How fast people forget. There was both the VAXstation I and the
>> VAXstation II. Same machines as the MicroVAX I and MicroVAX II, but
>> with a graphics subsystem. Yes, Q-bus, yes, RQDX3, yes, RD54 and RX50,
>> or RD54 and TK50. All in a BA23.
>
> MicroVAX I, VAXstation I, the VAXstation 100 (which allowed one a
> VAX-11/750 Unibus, or two on a VAX-11/780) and a small blizzard of
> rarely-remembered three-digit VAXstation model variants for different
> graphics widgets, too, that were available before DEC got a workstation
> product available with the QVSS on the Q-bus.
>
> Why only one 100 on a /750, you ask?  Drag a window around on the
> VAXstation 100, and the whole /750 went out to lunch.
>
> In addition to the Q-bus and Unibus, VAXstation boxes were also
> available with the BI bus, with the M-bus on the SMP VAXstation systems,
> and various busless boxes.
>
>> They might have come with RD53 as well, but you get they idea...
>
> The earliest MicroVAX I boxes arrived in a BA23 box, with an RX50 and an
> RD51 hanging off an RQDX1.  You could watch that RD51 disk seek, too,
> with the rotation of the knob that stuck out the side of that disk
> showing where the heads were.
>
>

I always figured that the MicroVAX I was just a proof of concept that 
DEC shouldn't have put on the market but decided 'what the heck, let's 
see if we can sell a few and recoup some R&D.' Compared to its 
contemporaries it performed like a snail on tranquilizers.