VAXStation Trash to Treasure Ep.1 | Unexpected Auction Win
Вставка
- Опубліковано 27 сер 2024
- ● Support RMC on Patreon: / rmcretro
● Treat me to a Coffee with Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/rmcr...
● MonsterJoysticks: monsterjoystic...
● 1ClickPrint: www.1clickprin...#RMC
An unexpected auction win kicks off our next restoration series. This time it's a Digital VAXStation 3100, setting you back a cool $10,000 to $18,000 in 1989. Get to know our new machine with me and I'll consider if this is beyond repair, or if we should dive in and get to work on it.
Series Episodes:
Ep1. • VAXStation Trash to Tr... ).
Ep2. • VAXStation Trash to Tr...
Ep3. • VAXStation Restoration...
Music:
"Forget me not" - E's Jammy Jams
"Sunday Stroll" - Huma Huma
"Parasail" - Silent Partner
"You're no help" - Silent Partner
Beer and dodgy eBay purchases are half the basis of my channel
Lazy Game Reviews hehe...
Never thought I’d see you here.
lol
Morning hangover Goodwill thrifting is the other half. :D
I came to watch this video and then decided to sub. Also seeing LGR being one of the watchers, I think I made the right choice when subbing.
Bahaha my thoughts exactly.
It's 2019 and we still have one of these in service at my work.
Now you have to make a video about it.
This brings back memories. I probably built that unit when I worked at digital computers in Ayr Scotland. Thats a 1993 machine. Remember the factory well, it was huge and the other Vax systems were really big.
+John Paton that's really cool, what was your job there? Can you share any more memories?
Hi, I started on the production line and made loads of different systems including the MicroVAX Model 10 and Model 20, VAXstation II. I remember the RAM boards used to get delivered to your cell by 2 security officers. Your machine probably had the DEC SCSI 1GB or DEC SCSI 8GB drive which had rubber dampening all over them on the later models. After several years I moved into repair as I was actually an electronics engineer. It was a sad day when the plant closed. I also worked at IBM in Greenock and that place was huge. Again, nothing but a call centre there now which is sad. I had loads and loads of Digital service manuals, tools and parts which were up my mums loft for years and when I moved to Scarborough in 2002 I binned them all. Wish I kept them as they would probably be worth something now. Good luck with your restoration and I agree, the build quality was great despite us only having 20 mins to build each unit before it went onto hipot and test..
20 mins?! Wow! Good job they're modular.
John, same thing with Timex in Dundee, everybody had a family member in there making ZX Spectrums, calculators, watches or even bits of military hardware and doo-dad's for satellites but now it's a big waste ground where joyriders dump cars.
Rob Fraser aye, and Davie Jones who left and used his redundancy money then formed DMA Design with hits like Bloody Money, Menace etc. DMA then became Rockstar North and is famous for Grand Theft Auto...
Wow! I can't believe how good those boards looked. A real beauty! And lovely how you can really disassable every part. I miss that in modern tech.
Modern tech is built disposable, with a short expected life span, consumerist business model. Dec computers were built to last, but very expensive ... ;)
son-Of -dubya
I worked at DEC in the 70s. The computers were built to last, but only if you kept them on a maintenance contract. I remember the pitiful moans of customers who decided to forgo the contract and ended up having to pay per-call prices when something went wrong.
Modern server/workstation grade tech is even easier to disassemble! :D
Very nice video! Never had a VAXstation myself but inherited a Digital Alpha Personal Workstation from a customer 15 years ago. It’s a shame DEC got swallowed up by Compaq and finally disappeared into Oblivion when HP gobbled up Compaq in turn. DEC built computers for engineers and scientists, those things were built to last. Can’t have that in our consumerism driven society nowadays, of course 😔 Keep up the great work!
Indeed!
20 MB in 1989? That's insane!! All we had in our home was 1 MB in the Atari Mega ST1. And even then I felt privileged among all my friends, who had the odd NES or at most a C64.
That's why these high-end workstations were so expensive.
I used to have in my collection a 1992 Apollo 735/99 that had 128mb of ram.
One of the the reasons for the cost of the system was the pressure to provide a nice memory upgrade path. I have a sun 2/120 in the cellar. that is a machine which can accept i believe 7 MB (it exists a mutltibuscard with 4 MB) and that was in 1984.
The Sun 10 i also have can take 512 MB with the right memory modules.
I had one of these in the late 1980s. I sed it to do Genrad ICT tester program development. The base configuration was 8MB; the one I had was maxed out with 32 MB. I had a large B&W (Monochrome) monitor. It was something like 20" or 21". Previous machine for this purpose was a PDP 11/23. The last test program I tried to generate on the PDP 11/23 took a week, and failed. The Vaxstation took 2 hours, and completed successfully.
The Vax product line consisted mainly of minicomputers, and some high-end workstations. You can't compare them to home-market microcomputers. They aren't in the same product category at all. It's like comparing a present-day 64-core PowerEdge server to a present-day smartphone. They may be made in the same year, but they aren't the same kind of thing.
Ooh, nice. I worked for Digital in Reading in 1987-1988. I still have my clip Digital logo badge.
I've owned three VaxStations and one MicroVax over the years. Fantastically well made machines, and the pinnacle of CISC architecture - even the 4000 VLC ("Very Low Cost") version was beautifully laid out inside. I used the MicroVax as a novelty web server running NetBSD for a while, but sadly I parted with them a few years ago to save space. I acquired my VaxStations from a guy whose employer made power station SCADA systems - when they were decommissioned he was allowed to take the hardware home and passed it on to enthusiasts like me. The MicroVax came from my own employer at the time, who made warehouse management systems. These were super reliable machines, but sadly Digital Equipment Corporation were bought out by Compaq, who were then bought out in turn by HP, and the technology including the Alpha processor quietly disappeared.
There is a variant of the puck mouse that doesn't use a ball but two off set cylinders. One for the x axis and 1 for the y axis. Works better than the ball version. Works on both the DECstations and Vax machines. Also, Digital's variant of Unix called "Ultrix" will also work on that machine.
In the mid 90's (Windows 95 introduction) I worked at a box store that sold everything from stoves to stereos and my department was computers. We had Digital tower computers. They were not a bad computer but you would be walking down the aisle and notice that the speakers would be ON FIRE!!!. Not once, not twice , but a total of 4 sets of speakers would either burst into flames or sit there and have smoke rolling off of them. We took the speakers off of display and the store would give a "FREE" set of speakers with each computer after we had opened all the boxes and removed the Digital speakers that came with the computer. The Digital printer was a ink hog having only a color cartridge that went over every character 3 times to make a black ink from the 3 colored inks.
I used to build these at Digital's factory just outside Ayr!
Nice! I've lost several originally expensive pieces to old batteries. So many designs had them on the board, or at the top of a case, where they could leak downward.
No beer, but insomnia will do the same...
When a Pentium 3 was a relatively current machine I picked up a Digital Pentium 3 pizza box machine. Amazing build, drew air lengthways across the processor and straight out the case. I actually sold it for more than I bought it for after about a year, though considering you could set your own MAC address in the BIOS I really did wish I'd kept it later on.
Great video. I've always had a secret love for old unix workstations like SPARCstations, NeXT computers and VAXStations. Look forward to more.
I worked on the fare collection system upgrade for London Underground in the 1980s as a software engineer (not on the DEC systems) and it was the biggest network of mini-computers on the planet at the time. Each station had a DEC PDP and they all hooked up to a DEC VAX system at the centre. Proprietary interfaces were the name of the game until the 1990s, some standards did take affect in the 80s but computer manufacturers wanted to hook customers forever and they did it with a big sales force and proprietary hardware.
In my first (and earlier) job I specified a DEC Rainbow PC for a small project because it had a Z80 and 8088 processor so could run CPM and Dos, I thought it would have a good future because of that, Oh dear, how wrong was I! But the Rainbow did the job and I got a free 'DEC Rainbow' mug out of it.
Wow I'd love to know more about that, will you make a documentary? :-)
You may not have noticed this but the memory daughter card (the one with the "maindec" serial number sticker) is not OEM memory. It's aftermarket memory made by a company called Clearpoint, Inc out of Hopkinton, MA in the USA. DEC, like most OEMs of the day, charged very high prices for OEM memory. Hence there was a vibrant aftermarket for expansion memory for PDP-11's and VAX's.
I used one of these in the early '90s when I worked at GEC Avionics (now BAE SYSTEMS). The department only had 3 due to cost and these were shared by 20 odd people. However, I was the only person who had one to their own and I loved it. Those were the days :)
The bloke who sat opposite me at work back then had one of these (or something very similar) on his desk. And he was surrounded by microVax systems too! My Unix machines were quite juicy but, still, I had serious hardware envy.
I hope you get to power it up and enjoy the true joys of VMS!!!! DEC hardware was always superb but the OS is a nightmare. I was the manager of a team tasked with porting a huge product from SunOS (a very palatable flavour of UNIX) to VaxStation under VMS and DECStation under ULTRIX (DEC's take on UNIX). DEC was funding the port because the product had been selected for the F22 (Raptor) development project. I was offered a VaxStation (full colour with a 19" monitor) for my desk ... I passed and went for the DECStation ... Your video took me right back to 1990 before the grey set in. Thanks!
How clean those boards were after 28 years. Amazing.
Nice. I got a free MicroVAX 3100 a few years ago that had run a travel agents from the late 80s until 2000. This was when people still smoke in the workplace, so it was ripe with the scent of 12 or so years of stale nicotine and tar.
You'd be amazed how a run through the dishwasher sorts that out though.
Work with these every single day; we have one running on the system still good for like 15 years; we actually have to check the paper work to inventory it at its physical location. VAX hardware and Software rocks and is unbeatable in so many ways.
A friend of mine really loved the built-in versioning of the VMS filesystem. He really missed that when Eastman migrated to Windows NT. He was very fond of repeating that joke about what comes in the alphabet after VMS ... LOL
A friend of mine really loved the built-in versioning of the VMS filesystem. He really missed that when Eastman migrated to Windows NT. He was very fond of repeating that joke about what comes in the alphabet after VMS ... LOL
I am doing a bit of a rewatch of some of the Trash to Treasures. You've come such a long way since these videos were made, but there is something special about these early videos as well.
I remember eBay bids and unexpectedly winning, still do sometimes :)
Weird how older episodes you're not seen pop in to your recommendations.
From decades old memory, the keyboard looks identical to the one we had with an office hand-me-down DEC Rainbow.
Ah, VAX/VMS and MASS-11. Those were the days in the late 80's/early 90's working in aerospace. Created many test reports in MASS-11.
Oh, I know the "POP". Fortunately, it was just the PSU, but I held my breath when I saw that little wisp of smoke coming out of the case.
I can't wait for the rest! What's that? I don't have to? Off I go!
Instead of installing (loud) SCSI hard drives, consider getting an SCSI2SD instead. Also if you get the PSU working, you can replace the fans with quieter ones.
Thanks, I will consider that, we put a CF card in the 486 for the last refurb series and it worked a treat. I might want to keep this one to the original parts though, not sure yet let's see how it pans out and what parts are available. I'll look into the SCSI2SD option
My beloved NeXTStation has a 7200 RPM 4GB Seagate monster and sounds like a jet turbine most of the time. :P
68 pin "wide" SCSI was actually quite standard in the enterprise market -- still very common even ten years ago. That logo suggests it is single-ended.
3:44 I really like the Jazz Club reference :D
The lab my father ran had a VAX-11/780. The first job (1990) I had the company was using micro-VAXes and micro-VAX II. I would try and sneak into the computer room to see them. Then in 1993 I joined another company and we had VAXStations (and DEC PCs!) and then a couple of years later moved to VAX-Alphas
"Liked" the video one minute in for the mouse "giving your hand cramp just by looking at it". You had read my mind. My hand had already tensed up just seeing the thing.
Aaaaah. I was going to bid on this but I have no room and no time. Glad somebody got it who appreciates it.
lrochfort How funny! Sorry buddy, the next one is yours
a quick look on ebay tells me all the decstations are now hundreds or thousands of euros 😭
Hm, that sticker isn't "SYSTEM MANAGER" as in, owned by the system manager. Back in the day (early Internet), the VAX/VMS operating system as shipped came on a machine had a pre-configured admin account named "SYSTEM" with a password of "MANAGER". The documentation, of course, advised that this was to be changed immediately. Looks like it might not have happened on this poor machine!
I believe that that "SYSTEM MANAGER" sticker is a classic case of a post-it-note password. :facepalm:
You are correct! The original owner of the machine mentioned this to me when I showed them the refurb, definite facepalm post it note moment
Also, system/manager is the default login/password for Oracle Database. Maybe Larry Ellison was a fan of VAX? Or vice versa
I was quite worried that it'd be a while before you had another series brewing. Glad you're back so quick! This one looks interesting as well.
RIP DEC
At school, back in 1990-1992, I used to study Pascal and then C on Vax/VMS machines. We also had Apollo station (simulation ? or math ?) and Sun Sparc with Solo (?) and Cadence (both µchip EDAs) installed on them.
My trusty VAXstation 3100 76/SPX of about the same age as this one finally failed this past weekend. Actually, one of the two 1GB disks failed; I believe the remainder of the system still works. I got a 460-day uptime out of it once, and over a year several times, mostly limited by the reliability of the local power utility. These were some wonderfully engineered machines, indeed.
Nice, George Costanza(Jason Alexander), is in the digital commercial. Anyway, that is a neat machine.
i miss my puck mouse! i too had a 3100 some years back after a clearout at work :)
I see sir, well i look forward to watching more of your videos. Thanks for getting back to me.
Wonderful to see you restoring some DEC iron. I'm a big VAX, AXP and pdp-11 collector so this greatly warms my heart :) Wish I could thumbs up multiple times.
I have spent from 5:30 until 11:00 pm viewing your man cave videos ... it's a wonderful place, I love it :)
I appreciate it, thanks for taking the time to hang out here!
good luck with the restoration. I always look forward to your new videos about ancient computers. I really love it.
That was my bag until DEC suddenly went bust. Started with PDP11/70 and then onto the VAX & Alpha unit's. Providing DR across the UK we had lot's of kit. MicroVAX's were a fun little unit.
You should find yourself a VT340 for that little beauty.
Our local university had around 8 or 10 of those on a coax ethernet LAN with only enough local disk space to run the basics. They booted the OS from a central server and took "forever" to boot across the thicknet network. But, the models we had were attached to 19" (or maybe they were 21", huge for the era, anyway) Sony Trinitron displays. The operating systems instructor had the entire class come down to the lab to run a brand new program for accessing the Internet called, "NCSA Mosaic." LOL No more Gopher.
Lost it at the intro haha, this is literally how I started getting back into old gaming PC's
3:15 Good old SCSI, broadly incompatible with itself never mind any *other* protocol. I wouldn't bet my life on 50-pin devices working without a hitch through that converter cable either.
Yeah... wound up with a CNC milling machine from the late ‘70s that way... doggon thing weighs more than a large SUV! 😲
I actually did know a family who had a Digital PC, I believe it was a 486 and it had Windows 3.1 on it, their kids played games on it.
I am positive that that little commercial spot you played had Jason Alexander of Seinfeld fame in it.
The Digital whatever it takes at the end, was from later. The Vaxstation was in the blue logo era, before they re-branded in burgundy with the top of the T sloping in the final days before being bought by Compaq.
That's some top DEC knowledge, I did not know that thanks
Great video. Wonderful machine!
Splendid! I only got to work on VAX systems at uni. Great historic piece.
A little late to show, but I remember these from back in day the working at digital. I wish I had kept my Vaxmate 286 :D
Retro tech? Oh!, Beer, ebay? ooh! quoting the fast show? Oh! suit you sir! I'm subscribing.
Haha finally someone got that reference :p! You ain't seen me....right
Great find; i really hope you'll be able to get it up and running again. :)
You definitely aren't the only one RMC, I bid on a Sun Blade 1000 a few weeks back... "I'll never win at that." - guess whats clogging up the space under my desk now. Yep, the very same Blade 1000. Doh!
LMFAO @10:05 Thats a Maindec key number - I work for Maindec now known as MCSA (Maindec Computer Solutions Associates), we still have these on maintenance with us. That must be an old customer unit.
I think you should have more subscribers. I really like the pleasant atmosphere in your videos.
Thank you Brad very kind. While the channel was registered by my 5 years ago, I've only really made content this year so it's slowly gaining momentum while I refine my presentation etc. Glad to have you on board.
Sharing my man cave with a pianist would drive me nuts, you should install a soundproof partition covered in egg cartons or something so you have peace to record these videos.
Rob Fraser I've always been ashamed of my tiny pianist. I can only apologise.
a good tip is wire a light bulb holder into the mains lead when u put a light bulb in acts as a resister if its dim things are ok if its bright then its drawing to much 100watt bulb bright things wrong a short ? lets caps fill slower wich helps old ones warm up exspand slowly no suden exspansion or blows maybe im going too far here but works for old valve radios anyway and bulb gets brighter after a while too
God! I can watch any of your videos. Even though I've never had any of the machines!
Thanks Molly, nice to know you're in the cave :)
Well, except the Amiga! I used one in the 1989 film, Murder on the Moon with Bridgit Nelson. Huge admiration for your knowledge by the way.
so many memories
I love that Digital Equipment Corporation is getting some love here, but I want to try OpenVMS and a little more of Digital or Tru64 UNIX. Your box might run Ultrix however. That, or NetBSD, would be interesting. Great content! Thanks for everything.
Looking forward to seeing if you manage to get this running in all its glory. Looks like a beast. Good luck on this one and keep up good work!
those old RAM modules are frackin cool :D
Woohoo moment when you turned over the boards! ;-)
20MB RAM? Evidence of time travel. This thing must have been from the future.
This machine looks fascinating. Onward to part 2...
Well done on the BNC connector naming! I think you are the first person I have "met" who knows what their real name is. Neill also gave their name to the "N" connector, and of course the TNC "Threaded Neill-Concelman".
Put a cheeky 99p bid on an old Zenith ZFL dual floppy laptop a while ago after a few cloudy ciders, it's currently sat in a drawer waiting until I find a use for it.
This was so pleasant to watch.
Thats one of your take all the motherboard stuff out press in some achohol carex hand gel in every part of the case with the oil on it applying a press to every bad area. Rub in a lather from a full soak bucket with scratchy scour sponge and water rince over every part of the rubbed in gel to make it all bubbley enough to slide the crap off and then dry it all off with a dry cloth thing after that followed by a retrobrite for colour regain.
Needs the whole serbang this does thats full of oiled in grease on random areas.
Hehe you know it...this is an old episode but it was fun to work on...back in the old cave
Maybe after it's lathered with the bucket of water you may even need to hit a pressure wsher used on fences after that before the drying and retrobriting.
Of course it's done already now but I'm having a laugh of what could have been the scenario of it because that thing was grimey. lol
Excellent score.
I acquired the mouse to one of these many years ago. I don't still have it though, but at least now I know what it was from.
I used to have a digital DEC P1 166mhz mmx laptop. 48mb ram, 4gb hdd. Was great for genesis and snes emulation... and some old dos games
Good luck with the restoration. I have two of these. A M76, which works, and a M38, which does not. The M38, like yours, also had a leaking battery, but the battery was loose and it leaked onto the on board memory (1MB I think?).
Aaron Jackson Thanks Aaron, any tips from a man with experience on these systems is always welcome
Hmm, tips... I am not that experienced with them but I could mention a few things. I once reached around to power off the M76, my hair brushed against the screen of my VR290 monitor, and some static arced across between my wrist and a section of bare metal on the side of the case. Unfortunately it killed the optional SPX graphics module (fortunately my M38 had one in too!). So, just be careful with static I guess.
Some of them don't like being warm, and will begin to throw (usually) correctable memory errors. OpenVMS handles these just fine, but BSD doesn't know what to do with them. If you do plan to try out OpenBSD or NetBSD and experience these problems, you can usually just get a desk fan and blow cool air through it.
I usually use mine with a VT420 terminal, since NetBSD doesn't support the graphics module... Although OpenBSD can use it as a console. aaronsplace.co.uk/comp-vax3100m76.html
Finally, the VR290 is HUGE and HEAVY. I like having it about, and it seems to work, but if you are interested I would reluctantly give it to a good home.
ther's nothing like a DEC. that's the show case for "they don't mak'em like that any more". old SUN machines are nice, but DECs are even better.
As soon as I saw the battery wasn't in a holder on the main board I knew you'd be OK :-)
Yep. I wish this was standard practice nowadays. Of course, caps can still leak, but all of his look pretty good so far.
Awesome stuff!
That Puck mouse reminds me of the original 1998 iMac G3's mouse
she's a beaut! indeed! too bad about that corrosion though..
Aww, seeng episode 2 and 3 at the side just spoilt the suspense. PS. I have a souveneir badge from a scrapped 8820 - now THAT'S what you call a VAX!
+Matthew Day haha I get called a tease when I'm working on a series, I ruin the suspense when I've finished them....what's a man to do?
The Mouse looks alike Grandfather of a iMac G3 mouse
I totally thought Michael from Vsauce started another channel.
You know what I find funny? I can EMULATE that entire system on a raspberry pi, that costs a total of 70 bucks.
Awesome!
You have a nice channel. Very relaxing to watch.
The leaked battery has affected some of the main board - see the green stuff in the corner. My microvax looked similar with the battery leakage, but the main board works ok. Might want to try and clean up some of that corrosion though.
You're right there's a tiny bit which has worked up the screw but it hasn't reached any of the circuity, just the insulated shield that the screw goes into. I'll be sure to clean that off in the upcoming episodes.
Love the channel :) Keep it coming :)
Knew someone that that used AXP for its floating-point. Puzzled because only 64-bit FPU. Guy who discovered Pentium FDIV big used it because 80-bit FPU.
Dear God it's beautiful.
I get loud pops but I don't unload them on eBay 🙈 glad he did tho.
I need a cold beer
I worked as a sales engineer at DEC in Silicon Valley from 1989-1994. I should have never taken the job. Digital totally dropped the ball on Unix. In the late 70’s literal thousands of PDP and VAX minicomputers were sold only to have UNIX installed on them. DEC did not get it! Then along came the super microcomputers like Plexus, Pyramid, Sequent. All made a VAX running UNIX look like a snail. Even Sperry/Burroughs/Unisys signed resale agreements with new “VAX Killers”. DEC always treated UNIX as a bastard child and suffered for it as did Hewlett-Packard. I worked for HP for a while too. Too much “not invented here” syndrome.
Why even bother with a hugely inferior OS? UNIX was a garbage then even compared with RSX-11M. VMS was light-years ahead. I still remember my shock facing SysV on a 68K for the first time.
@@dmitrykazakov2829 UNIX is still very much alive today while all of the DEC operating systems are pretty much toast. Your comment is exactly what management at DEC thought. Meanwhile Sun Microsystems was eating their lunch. Betamax was better than VHS. The marketplace wanted open systems rather than an army of incompatible operating systems running on different architectures.
@@MultiPetercool This only confirms the fact of absence of a working market and negative selection. The best die first.
As for mismanagement, DEC managers did nothing to promote LSI-11 with RSX-11M as a personal computer. Olsen famously said that nobody needs a computer at home. That was especially rich from a company pioneering mini automation system solutions!
x86 is much alive today too - the worst processor architecture ever. Would you claim that DEC should have abandoned PDP, VAX, Alpha as well? As for me, I am not a sales man, I am a software developer. I know that DEC software and hardware was the best in all possible aspects, best compilers for C, Ada, Fortran, best OSes RSX-11, VMS, best visual debugger, best integrated IDE (LSE), best peripheral connectivity for customer-specific solutions.
@@dmitrykazakov2829 I don’t see how the best die first fits here. PDP and VAX simply were outperformed by commodity microprocessors. Alpha was simply too late to market. DEC bled money trying to get applications vendors to port their product. HP made the same mistake with Itanium. Having worked for both companies I have to say that Internal infighting kept real progress from happening in the UNIX market space which effectively was the only one that mattered by 1990. If your operating system didn’t end in X, no customer wanted to touch it.
@@MultiPetercool PDP and VAX were outperformed only decades later. Out of curiosity I measured performance in late 80's/early 90's and PDP-11 was still faster than an i286. Alpha was right on time. It was faster than anything else, it was 64-bit. The problem was that Windows already won and there was no point in running 32-bit x86 applications in the compatibility mode on Alpha. DEC simply had no resources to breach the gap and flood the market with Alphas.
UNIX was a non-starter, nobody wanted it except for, maybe, on a file server in some dusty corner. This is how SUN and SGI lost it, quickly replaced by x86 machines. If not Linux and to a lesser part BSD we would not have UNIX clones now.
In my view the mistake was consistent refusal to go into the personal computer market segment, not only by DEC, but basically by all major players. x86's quickly eradicated working stations first and servers second. That happened regardless the quality of software and hardware. Should DEC have pushed its Ultrix more it would die sooner, IMO.
This is not an exaggeration. I was surfing ebay and bid on something in exactly the way you described. A week later i got notified that I won.... A house... I bought a house on ebay... Paid for it with paypal... 3 years of repairs later,, i live in it...
That's amazing. I need to hear more about this. Make a video about the house you accidentally bought on ebay please!
That's a good idea. My son was only 9 months old at the time and would wake up in the middle of the night and my wife and i would take turns feeding him. I would hold him in one arm and surf ebay while he was eating. I noticed in the categories that there was a real estate section and thought "I wonder if there's any auctions near me?". Then when there was i thought. "Wow, that's cool! That's a good neighborhood too... I'll put in a 3K (US) bid to keep an eye on it." never in a million years thinking I would win. The worst part is, 3 months before the house, i accidentally bought a car too. Who would have guessed you could buy an SUV that had a valid safety and emissions inspection for $400... You can't make this stuff up...
I was wondering all the way through the vid why the model number seemed so familiar...
And then you removed the PSU. lol
A guy on Facebook sent me. 3100 PSU to try to repair a few years ago.
It was a nightmare to work on, as there were no designators, and I couldn't find a schematic at the time.
IIRC, it uses an IC which detects when the mains voltage is arround 110-120V, and after a short delay, it switches in a transistor (or TRIAC?) to allow the PSU to run with the lower input voltage.
I think it used the usual method of having the two large reservoir caps in series for 220-240V operation, then the transistor effectively puts the caps in parallel for 110-120V mains input?
I replaced the main switcher IC, opto, chopper transistor(s), start-up resistor, and some caps, but the PSU still refused to live (kept blowing fuses, and I wasn't set up with a variac nor current-limiting bulb at the time.)
The guy then said that he'd been bought another working 3100 for his birthday (he's crazy about the DEC / Vax machines, especially for a youngster. lol)
So, I just sent the old PSU back to him as-is, sadly, as the cost of new parts was starting to add up.
You can actually safely remove that mains input voltage switcher IC btw, as it only kicks in when the input is below about 140V.
Going to watch part 2 now. Great channel. ;)
My Dad designed that horrible mouse. Haha
James Stoddard does he have unusually small hands? Hehe tell me more what was his job?
That SCSI port does look pretty scuzzy.
nice. really nice. fast show lol
lucky you entertaining youtuber!