Singing Potatoes
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Monday, 14 April 2008
Geek heaven
Condescending Linux user

In college, I spent a lot of time on the school's VAX/VMS mainframe. I loved that system; compared to a brain-dead OS like MS-DOS, it was like a virtually unlimited playground even though I only had basic user privs. And it stood me in good stead for my first job, which involved programming on their VAXen.

Today, I was overjoyed to discover that there's an opensource old iron simulator which includes the VAX hardware - and that a hobbyist license for OpenVMS is free if you join a participating user group (also free). The installation media isn't free, but $30 (shipping included) is an absolute steal.

I don't have the install CD yet, but the instructions for getting the emulator set up have worked nearly flawlessly up to the part where it's required (I had to change the makefile to point to the actual location of libpcap.a on my system, and to add -lrt to the CC flags). Once it was compiled, though, it passes all its system tests and is ready for me to load on the OS.

It's funny, though. The VAX 8650 my university had was cutting-edge in its day, and had a six-figure price tag. Yet by today's standards, it seems rather anemic: a mere 18MHz CPU capable of under 8 MIPS, a maximum of 256MB RAM, and a maximum of 20GB hard drive storage.

Oh yeah. Gonna party like it's 1986.


Posted by godfrey (link)
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