10 Mar
2020
10 Mar
'20
8:23 a.m.
I'm a genuine hobbyist - I've been trying to keep examples of every
os/system I've ever worked with to play with now that I've retired (either
hardware or emulation based). My VAX equipment turned to carbonised scrap
due to lightning a while ago and I'm now emulation based and have been
using the Hobbyist licence, but it looks as though it's just becoming too
much hassle to do it any more. So I'm dropping the whole thing - sad, but
I don't have time for nonsense any more.
On the upside, a system I've never worked on has ramped up greatly - I'm
having a lot of fun with Multics and the dps8m emulator/simulator. HPE -
have a look at the way Honeywell handled their legacy stuff and take a
lesson.
On Tue, 10 Mar 2020 at 17:07, Warner Losh via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 3:48 AM Peter Corlett via
cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote
on
2.
Declare that we need to develop an open replacement.
There is FreeVMS, but there also doesn't seem to have been any progress it
in the last decade and its domain has been lost and taken over by a
squatter.
Writing an operating system is *hard*, way beyond a weekend's hacking
which is
how most open source projects get going. Cloning an existing one is
doubly-so
because it has to be bug-compatible.
Linux has taken thirty years to get this far. It's arguable what is
"major" but
to a rough approximation, there are no good open source clones of other
operating systems of similar complexity: I'm aware of FreeDOS, AROS,
EmuTOS and
a few others, but they're relatively simple.
Linux never was a thing on the VAX that was very good. It was too late in
its life cycle to get enough love.
Linux and/or NetBSD/vax would be a good choice, though, to implement the
VAX's system calls and execute it's binaries. Though there were more
concerted efforts to do this years ago, but I don't know what became of
them. Google shows a smattering of efforts littered with broken links. :(
Warner