Motorola Delta 900 specific notes

The Delta 900 series is a followup to the series 8000, AFAIK. It comes in a stylish black case. The base unit houses a VME chassis comprising the CPU board(s) (MVME187, possibly also MVME197, plus I/O and transition modules (MVMEM712M, MVME3xx). On top of that one can stack additional storage boxes housing mass storage devices (disk, tape drives). Power and SCSI are daisy chained.
Motorola's claim back then was that, due to superior design, one could assemble and disassemble all configurations without the need of a screw driver (source: a long gone girlfriend of mine who worked for Motorola in the early 1990s). While this is partially true I found that the plastic housing is not all that stable, and removing the case might easily break something.

Pixx

RJ45 connectors

Startup

Self-test may take a looong time, be patient.

Using the debugging monitor

On power-up the system runs the self-test. To abort that sequence press ESC until you get into a selection menu. Select item #3 to get into the 187-diag monitor. Some commmands are:

IOI       # I/O inquiry, scans the SCSI bus and gives controller and device number
IOT;T     #
BOOT  <CLUN> <DLUN> # boot from specified controller/device
                  # <DLUN> = SCSI-ID*10
HE        # help, but not very enlightening

Last updated: 2-Aug-2008, M.Kraemer