DEC Emulation Website

[Zane Healy]

> On Oct 20, 2017, at 6:00 PM, Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Believe it or not, I am planning to update the pages in the near
>> future, who knows, I might even modernize them a little.  When I
>> started them, one of the design goals was that they be readable with
>> Lynx.  I’m not sure how important that is anymore. :-)
> 
> I have browsed it just few moments ago with lynx, emacs-w3 and my new
> textual favourite, elinks (it multitabs!! and shows tables!! and I could
> play with configuration a lot, so on 256-colors-enabled term it looks
> a bit nicer to my eyes). In all them, and in some old graphical one,
> the site looks decently.

My chief complaint is that it suffers from a readability problem.  Part of that is for the “updates” sections at the start of each page.  Let’s be serious, the pages haven’t been actively updated for years, so that’s no longer really valid.  There is new info out there, and a lot of links I’m sure are dead.

Though what’s really changed is my attitude towards emulation.  This might sound odd, but when I wrote the pages, I wasn’t that much in favor of emulation, and was more inclined to run on the real hardware.  It’s a heck of a lot more practical to leave SIMH running on a VM, than it is to have a real VAX or PDP-11 running 24x7.  Then again the main source of inspiration for the pages was the PDP-10, and I’ve never viewed running one of those at home as practical. :-)

Mind you, while I have a couple emulated VAXen running, I also have a real VAX, and a rather nice Alpha running 24x7.

Zane