Dave Dunfield wrote: I guess these are backed up somewhere - but I don't know of any publically available repositories. I expect HP might become slightly annoyed if this stuff popped up somewhere. (Although it seems you are allowed to acquire stuff covered by the Hobbyist program by copying media that others are willing to lend you, or presumably via FTP). Before OpenVMS V5.0, there was no LMF (Licence Management Facility). So your VMS LIC tape is probably not keyed to anything. It just patches VAX/VMS to allow more users. (I know DECnet worked the same way back then, probably clustering too). Without VMS LIC you get some default number of users (perhaps 8, i.e. 8 simultaneous logins). I'd certainly say that this stuff is old enough that it's worth archiving. The tapes are pretty simple IIRC. Some of them may well be bootable, but I would say that the most important thing is to save the savesets. For a direct image of the tape you could try VMSTPC. But you can archive the bulk of the important info just by mounting the tape in question and copying off the savesets: $ MOUNT/OVER=ID MKA0: label $ COPY/LOG MKA0:*.* device:[dir] I don't have a tape handy on my VAX right now so I cannot pop one in and figure out the actual gnarly bits (and I'm likely to have forgotten in the 5 years since I last did this!) The one thing I do remember is that if you are logged in as SYSTEM, then your default is SYS$MANAGER, which at least with later versions of VMS, is a search list. In which case there's a quirk that means that $ DIR MKA0: will list your tape contents twice. What I cannot remember is whether it just displays eevrything twice or does the tape operations twice: if the latter, then COPY will probably copy everything off twice! The fix is to SET DEFAULT somewhere that doesn't involve a search list first! Copying savesets off a tape like this is a slight cheat: backup goes to a lot of effort to write recoverable tapes and by using copy you are ignoring that. But as long as there are no bad blocks copying savesets off works just fine. If you do hit a bad block, COPY will fall over in a heap and you'll have to copy remaining savesets off manually. Then you'll have to use BACKUP to properly recover the savesets with bad blocks (but it's best to worry about that when you need to do it). There was a product called something like Saveset Manager, which did this (and much else besides) for you, but I never used it. Whichever will take the biggest data disk you have would be my preference. I've had no trouble with 18GB IBM SCA drives, so the easiest might be to drop a handy SCSI drive into an external enclosure? You might as well mimic the way CDs were organised: each product ended up in its own directory, so your FORTRAN distro would end up as [FORT046]. Then FTP the stuff over to a PC and burn (twice) to your choice of optical media (cue the annual archiving discussion ...). Or you could use LDDRIVER, give it a 700MB file (possibly contiguous?) and mount that as a writeable disk. Copy the savesets over in whatever directory structure you think appropriate. Unmount the LD device and FTP the file over to a PC. Burn (as a physical image) to CD and you you can mount that as an ODS-2 disk on OpenVMS (assuming, of course, you have a suitable CD drive). Initially it was a cut down version of VAX/VMS that would install from RX50 floppy onto a MicroVAX II. That's about 50 floppies. It was cut down in the sense that various programmer-only options were not available by default. It was fairly short-lived (from VMS V4 to V4.4) and then in V4.4 "ordinary" VMS was able to be tailored so that it would fit on such a MicroVAX. Antonio arcarlini at iee.org No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.516 / Virus Database: 269.19.7/1234 - Release Date: 20/01/2008 14:15