[Info-vax] terminal servers etc

[David Froble]

Rich Jordan wrote:
> On Jan 8, 7:40 am, F H <fhs... at gmail.com> wrote:
>> For those who want to find a DECserver 90M on eBay or somewhere else:
>> please note that not all DECserver 90M terminal servers have a flash
>> memory card present!
>>
>> There are two or even three types of 90M devices:
>>
>> - Those without a flash card. They can be recognized by the absence of
>> an inscription on the front panel. They rely on MOP to download their
>> OS.
>> - Those with a 1 MB flash card. They have the inscription "1M Flash"
>> on the front panel. The OS is on that flash card but it takes several
>> minutes to decompress the OS on the flash card into memory. They will
>> download the OS over the network only when a special procedure is
>> followed at power-on time.
>> - It seems that a version exists with a 2 MB (or more) flash card.
>> This system boots stand-alone too and very fast because there is no
>> decompression to be done. I have however never seen this version.
> 
> Are you sure about the no-flash models?  That doesn't show up in any
> of the networking catalogs I still have (though that predates the
> selloff of the networking division, now owned by VNETEK).  They did
> show 1 or 2MB FLASH models, and also early 1MB RAM and later 4MB RAM
> (for NAS software) but nothing in the 90M without flash boot
> capability.
> 
> I need to open mine up and see what the flash looks like.  I'm pretty
> sure the RAM is just a standard 72 pin parity SIMM.

I'm with you on this.  I thought the major reason for the 90M was the 
flash memory.

The DECserver 700 could use a 4 MB 72 pin SIMM, and I don't know if it 
had to be parity.  I believe it was the same 4 MB memory SIMM as used in 
one of the DECpc.  386 or 486 ??

So far I haven't found a 90M here.  Maybe I never had one, just 
remembered them from customer sites.