19 Jul
2000
19 Jul
'00
10:53 a.m.
--- "W.B.(Wim) Hofman" <hofmanwb(a)worldonline.nl> wrote:
What I did find however was that in order to get from
a KA41-D to a KA41-E
you had to switch Eprom. A MicroVax 3100 turned into a VaxServer this way.
A miracle. What consequences has such a switch for your software? Are you
no longer allowed to do things? Does some software run and other software
not?
I know that some stuff was written to check the model number and was
user-limited to, for example, two for a "workstation" and either unlimited
or less-limited for a "server". The idea was that you would pay less for
a workstation license and so there should be some way to prevent customers
from buying the cheaper product and using it on a more
"powerful" machine.
Lots of products, third-party and DEC alike, were priced based on the
capacity of your box. If you upgraded your CPU (adding extra CPUs, changing
out a 6xxx for an 11/7xx, etc), you typically owed lots of people lots
of extra money. I remember the phenomenon because our products were priced
according to modem speed (sync modems) - a 9600 bps product was about 1/2
the cost of the 56Kbps product. Our customers loved the fact that we would
let them pull a board from an 11/750 and drop it in an 8600 for no charge.
Back to you original question - there's a call you can make from DCL that
will tell you the type of CPU installed in your machine (It's an F$GETSYI
call, far enough down in the OS). As a developer, you can easily build in
code to refuse to operate on a "full VAX" or something similar, but that
wasn't common.
-ethan
=====
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