On Saturday 28 February 2009, Allison wrote:
Subject: Re:
UNIX for the VAXstation or AlphaStation
From: "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh at aracnet.com>
Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:47:24 -0800
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic
Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
UNIX is a waste of good DEC hardware! :-) DEC never sold a UNIX
variant that would run on a VAXstation 4000/60. I think NetBSD and
OpenBSD will both run on it. I'll confess that OpenBSD at least
used to rock on Alpha and can handle a machine with less RAM than
OpenVMS expects. Your choice of OS's are a lot wider for the
Alpha.
DEC sold Ultrix32 (unix BSD flavor) and it was installable on most
VAXen. I have 4.2 running on a UVAX2000.
I'll even admit that I got my 11/780 *specifically* to run UNIX on
them.... I want to set up a "Purdue recipe" dual-VAX and run 4.3BSD on
it; you can run VMS on any old VAX, Alpha, or some Itaniums... VMS on
an 11/780 is a waste of a good 11/780. :) (Ok, fine, I'll admit to
running VMS on my 11/780, but that was mostly to see if OpenVMS 7.x
would actually run, how "quickly" it would run, and to get 4.3BSD's
boot loader onto the console media.)
Pat
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