DEC MicroVAX-II #1

On August 8, 2001 Merle Peirce and Russ Goodman visited the Coventry Credit Union's Manville office to retreive a DEC MicroVax-II system. It was a difficult rescue, requiring complete disassembly of the system cabinet. The system was, installed August 28-29, 1986 for the former Marquette Credit Union. Marquette was one of the financial institutions closed in Rhode Island`s banking crisis in 1991. Our unit sat unused for 9 years in the basement of the branch that appears to have housed a small computer operations centre at one time. When Coventry Credit Union re-opened the branch three years ago, the MicroVax-II was not needed, and remained in a corner of the basement until given to RICM. As an additional bonus to us, an VT-100 terminal was donated. The Marquette Credit Union branch manager, Karen Lambresi, assisted in this donation.

This Micro VAX-II system has a 205 MB RA-60 removable disk drive in the top of the cabinet and the Micro VAX-II chassis in the middle. The MV-II chassis also houses a TK50 tape drive.

04-MAY-02 Update:

It's alive! The system is now functional and boots MicroVMS 4.5. It said that the last successful login was in 1987.

27-JUN-02 Update:

We received a pair of RA-81 disk drives as a donation from Harvard University. We will install one of the RA-81 drives in the bottom of the VAX cabinet and then install OpenVMS on the drive.