VAX 4k

[Scott Quinn]

I have one of the 4000/200s, and a single person (or married operating 
separately) can move them if you pull the drives, power supply, and 
possibly cards if there are many.
	It helps to think of the 4200 as a very good BA-4xx MicroVAX rather 
than a very wussy VAX, as it really has more in common with the Qbus 
MicroVAX 3xxx machines.
	Regarding the 4000/705A's- a picture of any BA440 VAX will look like 
them, not much has changed. I believe the 705A was one of the "server" 
model VAXen that only shipped with a 2-concurrent user license (maybe 
single-user?) but close to a VAX 9000 in processor power (slow 
perepheral interface, though [3.3 MB Qbus and 2 or 4x DSSI.] Would have 
been nice if DEC had put a high-speed interface beside the Qbus, but 
there's no point in worrying about it now. I don't think the current 
hobbyist license enforces the machine-class limitations, so you could 
use your 4k as a multiuser VMS installation. xBSD doesn't support DSSI 
currently, and 4.4BSD-QJ doesn't support VAX 4k, so you're pretty much 
stuck with VMS, but that's not a real limitation.
	Haven't got mine working yet, but if you need drives investigate a HSC 
system. Some interface the DSSI bus to SCSI disk arrays. HSD05 comes 
often as a standalone StorageWorks SBB for the BA5x blocks, and I've 
seen DEC documentation that indicates you could get an internal model 
that would connect to the storage backplane. Throw one of those on the 
middle, and do a DSSI cluster of the two machines, and you'd have one 
hot system. Enjoy it and use it well.