Greetings

[allison]

On 04/29/2019 11:37 AM, Jon Elson wrote:
> On 04/29/2019 06:47 AM, allison via cctech wrote:
>> On 04/28/2019 09:28 PM, Grant Taylor via cctech wrote:
>>> On 4/28/19 6:27 PM, Ray Jewhurst wrote:
>>>> I already have a Hobbyist License.  I am just interested in
>>>> experimenting with different OSes and different versions of OSes.
>>> ACK
>>>
>>> I don't know what VAX hardware VMS 1.5 supported, what VAX hardware
>>> that Simh supports, or what the overlap is between the two.
>>>
>>> There's a reasonable chance that someone will chime in with experience.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> You are limited to what the VAX-11/780 system had for peripherals and
>> typically under 8MB ram (it maxed at 16mb).
> Well, for command-line computing (well, this IS the classic computing
> list) you can do a lot.
> Our first 11/780 had half a megabyte of memory.  Friday afternoon one
> memory board went bad, and I pulled it out.  A user group ran a
> gigantic batch job of mechanical analysis over the weekend on 256 K! 
> I was amazed, I really thought it would thrash itself to death on that.
>
> I ran a microVAX-II at home on one meg for years.

The typical environment during the DEC years '83-93 was a 780 with a
4-12mb and dozens of users or more.
In 83 that meant 3.2 or later and much of the time was V3.8 or 3.9 till
maybe 86ish then V4 and soon after V5.
The years 83 and 84 I fondly remember V3.6 and later mostly 3.8 and
often the best available machine was
a PDP-11 [PRINCE] and [VIDEO] as the terminals and printers machines
were running RSTS and phase II DECnet.
Others of memory were MILRAT, REX, and ROYALT and later (1989) my own
work box VIDSYS (uVAXII BA123].

If memory serves V4 was the last that ran in 1meg, V5 pushed that higher
as a 4 meg system was more
common then.  However the Qbus uVAX has a RD54[system] and RD52[swap] on
separate MSCP controllers
for performance as thats where they bottlenecked when heavy swapping.

All my uVAXen have run from V4.4 [MicroVaxII/GPX] or later and my
nominal version is 5.4.  Though I have a
RZ56 with V7.2 on it.   All are physical hardware in the Qbus BA123
realm and M3100 series. 

>
> But, I never experienced VMS before about version 3.4, I think.  I'd
> really hate to run any VMS that didn't have loadable device drivers. 
> Doing the brute force sysgens was so RSX-11 ish.
> I think VMS 1.5 still had a bunch of utilities running in PDP-11
> emulation.
>
> Jon
>
Running anything before V3 is painful as it was a build.  Also V1 was
tied the 780 and that did PDP11 emulation
mode for a lot of stuff.  VMS changed a lot from 4.2 to 4.6, long file
names are one that comes to mind as well as
phase III and IV DECnet.

That was a long time ago.

Allsion