[rescue] Dec/Compaq ES40 & OpenVMS

[Mark Benson]

On 13 Jul 2011, at 12:14, Lionel Peterson <lionel4287 at verizon.net> wrote:

> As I go through my pile of treasures, I 'rediscovered' the ES40 I got at the
Princeton Surplus Sale maybe from two years ago, still untested. As I prepare
to clean it up and test it, I've had visions of putting OpenVMS on it - anyone
got any good pointers to resources for this effort?
>
> The specs of the box are unknown, it appears to have been built on
08/08/1999, and was most likely removed working. It may have an OS installed,
since the surplus shop folks didn't know how to wipe it (but the CS guys who
sent it down might have wiped it),
>
> Anyway, curious to find some reading material before I start working on this
beast - anyone got some good links? I guess I should be be applying for a
hobbyist license so I'll have it handy when I get around to powering up the
box...

The ES40 is a nice box, if not a little large :). To establish if it works
okay with unknown hard disks disks you just need some OpenVMS 8.3 Media and a
bootable CD-ROM drive. You *could* just type 'boot' at the firmware prompt
'>>>' and see if it fires also.

Have you used Alpha and/or VMS before?

--
Mark Benson

http://markbenson.org/blog