3 Apr
2012
3 Apr
'12
11:30 a.m.
On 04/03/2012 12:58 PM, Jon Elson wrote:
Well, I just timed it: Clean slate to running VMS system with a tape
image mounted on an emulated drive, under simh. 26 minutes.
But suit yourself. ;)
Nice!! How old are they? (if you don't mind my asking, I am just
curious)
You can
install simh on your Linux box, get VMS up and running in
probably half an hour, complete with IP networking. Mount your tape
images via simh and extract your savesets with the software that they
were written to be extracted by. :)
I have great difficulty thinking it is that simple. I don't
know your level of expertise with VMS or simh, so please don't
take this the wrong way, but...if you want to do that and would like
some help, I'd be happy to help you out. I can put together a "canned"
simh VMS installation for something like this in a very short time.
I got simh to teach my kids some machine language programming on the
PDP-11.
(We had a class last Sunday.) I appreciate the offer, but this would be a last
resort. I know VMS
darn well, I was
system manager and general developer on two VAX systems, and then on Alpha
systems for a number of years. I ran a MicroVAX (KA-630) in my home from
1986 to 2007 when the hard drive broke. I upgraded it over the years,
wrote
my own driver for a 3rd party tape controller that never had a VMS driver,
wrote a driver and built an interface for a Jupiter 7 graphics system,
and interfaced
a bunch of home energy monitoring stuff to it. Also attached a VCB-02
color
graphics board set to it, which was never really supposed to work on a
KA-630, but it did. Just the console wouldn't work right through the
VCB-02,
so sometimes I had to hook up a serial terminal.
Sweet!!
But, although I REALLY liked VMS 20+ years ago, I have
moved on, and
am now pretty comfortable in Linux. (Do miss the regularity of VMS, if you
know how to specify the options of one command, then all similar commands
will be the same.) The purpose of this exercise is to recover archival
programs
before the tapes turn into dust.
Good plan. I still love VMS, though, but I'm a UNIX guy through and
through.
If all else fails, I suppose I could go that way, but
this vmsbackup
program
seems to try to work, it probably needs a little tweak. It detects the
80 byte
header records and stops. All the VMS Backup tapes I've checked so far
have two 80 byte headers, this program seems to want one 256-byte header.
That doesn't sound too tough to deal with. Good luck!
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA