Hardware For Sale/Trade

It kills me to entertain the thought, but I need cash... Have the following systems:

- Sun Netra T1 105 (768 MB RAM, including one 512 MB mezzanine)
- Sun SPARCstation 20 (max RAM with 8 MB VSIMM)
- DEC 3000-300 (Alpha)
- DEC 3000-400 (Alpha)
- DEC VAXstation 4000-60
- Dell Dimension 5150 (Pentium D 2.8 GHz) with 3 GB RAM, Adaptec 2940-U2W, Pioneer DVD-RW, nVidia Quadro NVS 285 dual-DVI etc. (but you lot probably aren't interested in that. )

Plus:
- 2 ~140 GB SCSI drives (SCA) in two Sun 611 cases (not SE so one can't boot a Sun from them -- I don't think -- but they're good for backups)
- a few other smaller SCA drives
- 2 250 MHz UltraSPARC processor cards (pulled from a Sun Ultra 2, were working when I pulled them)
- IBM Thinkpad X31 with half-broken screen (sic)

If you're interested, make an offer. Everything is located in Paris. Local pickup is of course preferred. I will ship if you pay up front by international money order though.

Thanks!

[PM sent]

Do you have more information, specifications, on the DEC 3000 (300 & 400) Alpha systems? Also, do you have keyboards to go with them? (Because those particular models won't take regular PS/2 types, correct?)

It's DEC, so it will take a serial console. With DEC operating systems you won't notice much of a difference between local graphics console and network use. OpenVMS will require a bit of alternate key fiddling, but if you're running UNIX there won't even be that.

DEC graphics aren't great. DEC wasn't known for graphics and for the most part they weren't very interested in graphics, so it's the dancing dog phenomenon.

DEC 3000/300s use the same RAM as Indigo2/Indy. DEC 3000/400s and up use proprietary RAM, so specs may be more of an issue. Both use Fast Narrow SCSI drives, and the processor speed is indicated by the model number - strangely, the -300 is a bit faster at the CPU, but the -400 has a more efficient design (crossbar-based similar to the Sun UPA).

Thank you for the bit of information! Serial console would always work, but I thought DEC used a proprietary keyboard interface (somewhat similar to that of Sun and early SGI systems, I read somewhere) for a while also.

Yep. For many years DEC used the same keyboards on their workstations as on their VT* terminals, and the VAXstation/DEC3000/DECstation are no exception. They use LKA[x]01 keyboards, and on the 3ks they are attached via a breakout box (similar to the NeXT concept with the keyboard plugging into the sound box, but on 3ks the pigtail only does KBM).

These tend to get lost and then thrown away by people who can't figure out what they are in the absence of the Alpha (in organizations), so unless the machine comes with it you're probably better off ignoring it. The keyboards are easy to source, and the mouse is middle (common to the 3k, VAXstation and DECstation).