[Info-vax] Multia

[David Goodwin]

On Monday, November 8, 2021 at 12:36:03 PM UTC+13, MG wrote:
> On 11/7/21 16:07, Bill Gunshannon wrote: 
> > 
> > I used to have one of these.  Sadly, I let it go during my last 
> > household move.  Any chance anyone still has these sitting around 
> > taking up space (OK, they don't really take up much space) that 
> > would want to get rid of them?  I would love to have a couple to 
> > play with again.  Pretty sure I even have the stuff for how to 
> > get VMS to run on them stored away in my files somewhere.
> What's the fascination with this particular system, I wonder, it's 
> most certainly one of the least reliable and failure-prone systems 
> that had a DEC logo on it. 
> 
> In total I had two of them (one ending up to be a de facto 'parts' 
> system), where both had terrible heat-dissipation (even after the 
> 'community-recommended' modifications and operating it vertically) 
> and overall power supply/-related issues. I remember that even if 
> I could get one of these systems up and running, it wouldn't run 
> reliably for a longer period of time. 

Any chance you remember the symptoms of these problems?

I was having a play with my one (a 233MHz VX42B) a few days ago
but it seemed to be having intermittent problems. A blank screen
plus clicking from the speaker. Sometimes this happened on power-on,
other times it appeared to happen after leaving it at the ARC/AlphaBIOS
firmware for a while. Seems like unhappy hardware but I'm not sure
what or how repairable.

(I'd rather play with a real AlphaStation but they seem no easier to come by
in NZ than the Multias vertical stand)