[Info-vax] DEC rtvax300

[John Wallace]

On Aug 27, 4:08 pm, bbrown027 <bbrown... at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Looking for parts (in any condition), data sheet, hardware manual for this part. Willing to pay for consulting. Thanks in advance.

First, a sanity check. There were various things sold as rtVAXes. Most
of them were rebadged ordinary VAXes sold with different (much
cheaper) licencing specifically for use with VAXELN.

On the other hand, as Mr Moroney rightly points out, the rtVAX300 was
a module (as used on the KAV30 and in a few other even less well known
places, not all of which were VMEbus boards [1]) which was a single
orderable part, and afaik (based on having been UK support for these E
+RT things back then, including VAXELN and rtVAX300 and...) there were
no field replaceable parts for the rtVAX300 - if it fails, replace the
whole module.

The generic VAXELN docs are in the usual places which VAX/VMS people
will know about. VAXELN hides the system-specific stuff, so if your
interest is software, you've already got (most of) what you need. The
VAXELN Technical Summary, and the Introduction to VAXELN, are
excellent places to start. Once you've looked at those and if you want
to at least reproduce the existing setup you'll probably be wanting
someone familiar with the VAXELN development environment (assuming the
existing developers have moved on).

There is a slight chance I may have the specific rtVAX300 docs (such
as they were) squirreled away somewhere (probably on paper), but until
I'm sure they will be relevant, I'm not going looking.

If you are in France or Germany and looking for skills and knowledge
rather than parts you may find there are relatively local resources
still around. Can't comment on other countries.

If you want to buy just one or two of these you may find them on the
second hand market, or you may be able to find one on a VME board such
as the KAV30 (or its German close equivalent) and have fun removing it
and re-using it (if it survives).

You have posted the same query on at least one other forum where a
well known search engine finds it. Has that led anywhere yet?

Depending on what you're trying to achieve, if you ever knew anyone
capable of building a simple VAX (16MB RAM, on board LAN, not really
much else) from the ground up in an FPGA, now *might* be a good time
to renew that relationship. And now might be a good time to make sure
someone's got a decent budget ready.

On the other hand, if what you want to do is replace the software in
due course, either with something compatible or with something rebuilt
from the ground up, that's a different kettle of fish. You may well
still need a decent budget; there weren't that many VAXeln people
around, and frankly the details of VAXeln may not be the trickiest
part of such an exercise.

I've no recollection of seeing anyone write about running VAXeln under
SIMH, nor do I recollect any reasons why it wouldn't work, at least as
an evaluation or development tool.

There's also the small administrative matter of licencing for someone
to think about if you do decide to stay with VAXELN on hardware other
than rtVAX300.

A good time to have established a budget and a plan and to do this
might have been a decade or so ago when VAXELN, the software which
runs on the rtVAX300 and various other places, was effectively
retired. Or a few years before that, when the rtVAX300 and derivatives
had their "last order dates" announced. However, the real world
doesn't always work that way.

More details of why you're interested might help you get a better
targeted answer. It might also be helpful to say where you (and your
customer?) are, though if this eventually ends up as a software-
focused project, much of it may be amenable to working remotely.

Sorry for inconsistent capitalisation but with VaXelN, as with sUsE, I
can never remember what's right.

[1] Here is one example use of an rtVAX 300 module other than on a
KAV30 or similar
http://www.recycledgoods.com/products/Honeywell-51401088-100-CNI-HDW-FW-FLASH-W-RTVAX-300-Daughter-Card.html
Other industrial automation vendors also had similar products. But it
was a *long* time ago, and there's unlikely to be much evidence on the
Interweb.