Some of you are aware that I’m into vintage computers. Sadly, my basement cannot hold all the computers I wish I could actually have – and some of them are forever going to be too big to fit in any man’s house (not to mention “make it past a man’s significant other“).
But why would one actually need a VAX when, these days, one can emulate one on a Linux PC using SIMH? Not only can one emulate a VAX (take your pick: MicroVAX or VAX 11/780) but also a PDP-11, Data General Nova, some ancient Honeywell mainframes I’ve never heard of, or a bunch of other old mainframes or minicomputers.
I have a special nostalgia for the VAX, since I accessed my first real e-mail account at the National Capital Free-Net via a VAX in my dad’s office. On the anniversary of my Dad’s retirement, I’ve decided I’m going to try to get a VAX running in emulation under SIMH – running OpenVMS, no less. Do I know anything about running OpenVMS? Nope, I do not – but I’m going to find out. Yes, I know it’s a nearly obsolete operating system, and DCL is not the most intuitive. But hopefully it should prove to be a little bit amusing at least – wish me luck!
(On a completely unrelated note: People are still writing in to comment on the blog post where I got yelled at by Drew of Toothpaste For Dinner for offering an RSS feed. Haha! I’ve moved onto reading xkcd these days … that fellow seems far less uptight, and his comics are more reliably funny. And yes, xkcd has an RSS feed, if you had to ask.)
Pshaw!
Back in my day when we wanted to learn OpenVMS, we paid $50 for the CDs, $20 for a Vaxstation 3100, $10 for a working DEC 1x CD-ROM (without caddy), and another $5 making a working serial cable to connect to a VT220.
I bought two 3100s (not even measured in Mhz), and stuck NetBSD on one, OpenVMS on the other. I gave up on both when NetBSD took a week to generate an SSHv1 key, and OpenVMS, well, once I had it setup on a huge R23 (~500MB) HD, I had nowhere on the entire internet to look for archives, since Compaq refused to give away copies of the DecNet TCP stack.
..I should look at SIMH again – in 2001, I thought I was funny by binding it to port 23 with a read only BSDv6 image.
… nobody knew to type 'unix' when they saw the '@' 🙁