Pulled an old DEC Microvax 3100 model 80 from the basement and surprisingly it worked without any issue... for two days. Then it decided to work no more and I began repairs. At the end it works again but the reason was not expected...
We installed a Microvax to replace the big Vax system that had it's own airconditioned office. the microvax just sat on top of a bookcase. the old system was given away as scrap 😞 We had to keep a vax up and running to support a lot of projects that had a long operational life time. Great to see one again. even if I'd never want to use it's word processor and print processor again. the thought of all the page formatting being done in escape characters 🙂
Awesome to see these old workhorses... I sharpened my teeth on the VAX (starting with an 11/750) - but managed a number of them including a bunch of MicroVAX models. Great machines of the time.
I recapped the supply in my 5150 recently- it was actually an OEM upgrade supply made by Astec which has universal voltage (85-265V) and active PFC. The PFC board, which had one electrolytic capacitor, was an absolute pain to remove. I also had to wait another week on a capacitor which I forgot to put on the order...
We are cleaning up right now and many old machines must go. If you are intersted in old DEC hardware (Alpha) or SUN Sparcstation 5 and 20, let me know... (email is in channel info)
@@PlaywithJunk DEC is commanding crazy prices on ebay right now, i'm sure you could auction that, or get in contact with Usagi electric he might be interested in some of the DEC equipment
I remember to wok with DEC Rainbow PC‘s which had the same nice and eye comfortable screen and the keyboard wich had a separate numeric pad in opposite of the IBM PC. Fortunately this layout made the throughput up to today. Nice video!
The system board to disk tray cable is a bugger, there are also some rather sharp edges which caused many a swear word when I used to be a system manager on these things! Built like tanks though - wish I'd kept my VaxStation 4000/60. Worked on MicroVax 2000 all the way up to 7840's + many many Alpha systems. Loved em! OpenVMS still rules - far better than 'cooler OSes' that are about now & secure too - I should know, still in the IT game :-) The owners should make it far more available now its on x64 - I'd get a copy!
You did it the hard way of plugging the SCSI cable into the mainboard while it was still connected to the drives on the drive tray instead of unplugging the SCSI cable from the drives and plugging the cable by itself into the mainboard without the drive tray in the way.
Have you replaced the Dallas clock battery yet? I would have done that first. I guess I would have been wrong also. After that I would have assumed stiction on a drive (same as the other poster below mentions) that age. Glad it was something simple. When replacing a SMD component I prefer to hold it down with an xacto knife or similar instead of using tweezers. With tweezers the part will typically end up hovering over the board by the same amount it was when you pushed it down into the existing solder blobs on the board. When simply holding it down it'll be pushed down flat onto the board once the solder warms up. I knew a guy who used a MicroVAX back in the time of this device. I think it was a MicroVAX 2000. Something smaller than this.
One of my favorite tasks, replacing capactiors in a DEC PSU ;) Frist I thought it is the same PSU as in a MicroVAX/VAXstation 3100/20, but after you opened it, I saw it is a further developed design.
@@PlaywithJunk Yes, you're right, a VAXserver 4000/300. The picture is 21 years old, but the machine still exsits, although with another drive configuration.
@@PlaywithJunk I'll have a look at this video, I havn't seen it yet. The only game I played on VAX so far was Tetris on NetBSD on my VAXstation 4000 VLC :)
The initial not working when drives plugged in to power pointed directly at one of the drives having a shorted voltage line and not the power supply. Wy didnt you start with the actual problem in the first place as it was a dead giveaway?
Well…to add some extra drama to the video? 😊 No the reason is that the system worked fine one day before and I let it run over night. Next day it was crashed and I suspected the P.S. because I never saw a disk failing like this. But I had many of these P.S. with bad caps. And bad caps can cause strange phenomena like load depending crashes. So I started with the caps they needed to go anyway after that time…
Capacitors are the usual failing point. Sometimes a sensitive thermal camera can lead you directly to the tantalum cap. Even relatively new Macbooks have them fail. Surprised your mechanical drives still spin. I live in the Tropics and here the lubrication between the head and the platter tends to break down so discs do not spin up. Sometimes you can twist them to start spinning to recover the data. Else to go solid state is much safer. On my daily use the Macbook has all soldered close by, great for speed with repairability most compromised.
You scrap 10 year old working servers all day and give a 30 year old broken server all this love and attention. Ageism in computers is a strange thing!
What's special about 10 year old Systems? They're basically Intel servers with little differences on performance and management. Rescuing the 30+ year old servers is preserving history.
@@tiagodeaviz Oh, rest assured that the DEC was considered just as dull 20 years ago, and that the systems PwJ is scrapping today will be considered precious history in 20 years. It's the act of scrapping 99% of the population of a thing that in itself drives this effect.
Hi, could you sell / borrow / give the machine to another RU-vidr, NCommander from New Yersey? He works on compiling and running the BSD operating system from source on a VAX machine.
I've programmed all the Vaxen, from MicroVax to 8600 standalone and clusters. I wrote Vax/RDb, C , COBOL, and FORTRAN IV and Vax assembler, all 450 instructions of it. Ultrix and VMS. People must still use them for legacy apps because they go for thousands on Ebay.
The last ones we serviced were on a nuclear power plant. The process of replacing parts there is extremely complicated and bureaucratic. That‘s why they keep everything unchanged as long as possible.
