Looking for a small fast VAX development machine

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Mon, 22 Feb 2016, Mouse wrote:

> Well, obviously, if it really matters to you you should look into it
> yourself; what I wrote was based on wetware memory from years ago, and
> could be inaccurate for any of many reasons, most of which I'm sure you
> can imagine as well as I.

 Eventually I will and it's always good to know what to expect (hmm, from 
experience somehow the worst always happens anyway, but knowing the 
potential area of breakage does help).  X.org has gone modular at some 
point and that does help -- compared to monolithic X servers as they used 
to be -- with computers which are not the richest in resources, especially 
RAM (demand paging combined with overcommitment helps a bit, but still why 
have that stuff there in the first place?).  So upgrading makes sense from 
my point of view.

> But, yes, consider it a warning to look into it before just assuming
> that the support will (a) be there and (b) be non-bitrotted.  I trust
> my memory enough to be fairly sure that _something_ of the sort
> happened, even if I've got some details wrong.

 Honestly I'd expect dumb frame buffer support to just work, as there 
isn't much there to break or maintain.  A pixel array and a RAMDAC handled 
entirely by the kernel via generic calls isn't rocket science after all.

 So if they broke some generic parts (DIX) by the lack of due attention, 
then I'm really concerned.

  Maciej