I have got myself a Vax! It was used for processing meteorological data at Whenuapai air base, but they no longer use it so in Janurary 2001, they gave it away.
I must thank Antony Wardle for offering the Vax and organising with the air base staff for me to get it and also Maurice at Waitemata Weather for helping load the machine on the trailer.
Getting the Vax turned out to be something of an adventure.
It is a microVAX II dating from around 1987. It sure makes a huge amount of noise when you switch it on, I haven't counted the number of fans in the unit but there are probably about 10. The big disk is very noisy. It also has the biggest 5.25" MFM hard disk drive I've ever seen, I think it might be quad hight. It's the size of two cdrom drives stacked on top of each other. It also has an RX50-AA twin 5.25" floppy drive.
Initial Booting was a challenge.
Antony Wardle said that the machine made a terrible squealing noise last time he turned it on, suggesting that a disk had crashed. Currently it makes some noises that you wouldn't want your pc to make, but it doesn't make any noise that I would describe as squealing. With luck the drive is ok, or at least it can be reformatted.
