Posts: 7 Location: Sydney, Australia Joined: 21.02.09
Posted on March 06 2009 12:12
Just an uninformed observation.
These days delving deep underneath the hood is a distant memory, though I still have my IDSM somewhere safe, to wit, the esotericities are pretty much beyond me.
However it struck me in the past, when last thinking of such matters, that a port of SIMH to the QNX platform would be a *killer* combination:
http://qnx.com/
Lean and mean.
Similarly with the Stromasys CHARON-VAX and CHARON-Alpha emulators.
Though in these days of mature roll your own GNU/Linux building, there are other options for rock solid reliable host building.
Posts: 7 Location: Sydney, Australia Joined: 21.02.09
Posted on March 07 2009 11:13
All true enough.
However when you consider VMS, which can have an uptime of a decade, running on a hardware abstraction layer running on a host microsoft "BSOD'R'US" operating system, there is something dreadfully wrong with the picture.
Of course with tools such as "nLite" and your MS OS installation media you can make legit and relatively tight installation variants of MS OS, none the less, MS OS are still half baked at best, something out of the computing equivalent of Monty Python.
Running VMS on SIMH/CHAROn on MS OS, is akin to building a house on foundation pillars of mud-bricks.
It logically makes more sense to run the hardware abstraction layer on a host OS that is just as or more reliable than the guest OS.
So, in the example cited, QNX which is a RTOS for embedded systems, would be a natural pairing for SIMH and CHARON.
Of course with SIMH at least, one could build a small tight Linux distro, tuned specifically to running SIMH.
Why Stromasys doesn't support Linux and QNX as alternatives beggars the imagination, but that is by the by.
malmberg August 04 2022 No more VAX hobbyist licenses.
Community licenses for Alpha/IA64/X86_64 VMS Software Inc.
Commercial VMS software licenses for VAX available from HPE.
ozboomer July 20 2022 Just re-visiting.. No more hobbyist licenses? Is that from vmssoftware.com, no 'community' licenses?
valdirfranco July 01 2022 No more hobbyist license...sad
mister_wavey February 12 2022 I recall that the disks failed on the public access VMS systems that included Fafner
parwezw January 03 2022 Anyone know what happened to FAFNER.DYNDS.ORG?
I had a hobbyist account here but can longer access the site.
gtackett October 27 2021 Make that DECdfs _2.1A_ for Vax
gtackett October 27 2021 I'm looking for DECdfs V2.4A kit for VAX.
Asking here just in case anyone is still listening.
MarkRLV September 17 2021 At one time, didn't this web site have a job board? I would love to use my legacy skills one last time in my career.
malmberg January 18 2021 New Hobbyist PAKs for VAX/VMS are no longer available according to reports. Only commercial licenses are reported to be for sale from HPE
dfilip January 16 2021 Can someone please point me to hobbyist license pak? I'm looking for VAX/VMS 7.1, DECnet Phase IV, and UCX/TCPIP ... have the 7.1 media, need the license paks ... thanks!
