Personal DECstation 5000/25 specific notes

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Obtained two machines of this kind just for the shipping costs from a former student, from Switzerland. Originally they served in a CS lab. They were in real good working condition.
Funny enough the onboard graphics didn't work with an original DEC monitor, but was OK with an Eizo. Probably the DEC part starts showing its age, it had problems with other gfx cards too.
Update: that DEC monitor went south some time in 2011.
In general the Personal DECstations appear as low-cost offspring of the 100 series. From the outside they look very similar to the AXP 3000/300 pizza boxen. They appeared some time in 1992. DEC announced them as "RISC PCs".

Pixx

DECstation 5000/25 front view DECstation 5000/25 inside DECstation 5000/25 rear view
Note the strange mounting of the floppy drive, it's not a mistake, it just follows the curvature of the front cover.

Bootable CD-ROM

Like all DECstations, it seems the Personal ones only boots from original RRDxx drives. Mine booted from a RRD40.

RAM

The Personal DECstations come with 8MB onboard. In addition they have 4 sockets for the same RAM modules as the series 100, i.e. 2MB or 8MB, to a maximum of 40MB. Mine came with a total of 16MB. Precious little, but I'm running out of 8MB spares. OTOH, those old OSs aren't that RAM hungry.

Keyboard/mouse

DECstation 5000/25 keyboard/mouse
Other oddities are the keyboard and the mouse. Their layout is DEC-style as usual in that era, but their connectors very much look like HP HIL (although not compatible). I guess they're extremely rare these days.
Last updated: 19-Nov-2011, M.Kraemer