In article <sr6k1g$is$1@dont-email.me>, David Wade <g4ugm@dave.invalid>
writes:

> Whilst all these suggestions may work, I can't really see any point in
> running anything other than VMS on my VAXs. That is what they were
> bought for, that is what I have always done.
>
> Given the lack of a legal OS I am quite inclined to send them to the
> re-cyclers to be crushed and scrapped.
>
> This would appear to be my only legal way to dispose of them

Why?

On 1/6/22 6:33 AM, David Wade wrote:
> On 06/01/2022 09:44, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>> On 2022-01-06 00:29, Bob Eager wrote:
>>> On Wed, 05 Jan 2022 17:18:40 +0100, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>>>
>>>> For a PDP-11 I would definitely point at 2.11BSD any day of the week.
>>>> It's really nice and good, and actually pretty useful even for "real"
>>>> work.
>>>
>>> If the machine is use doesn't have separate I and D space, it's a bit of
>>> a tight fit. I remember the struggles we had.
>>
>> Today I'm not even sure you can get a non-I/D space machine running 2.11.
>>
>>> In that case, there's always Sixth Edition.
>>
>> Or Ultrix 11, as Bill suggested.
>> But then we're back to much less useful systems again.
>>
>>> And if it's a PDP-11 with no memory management, Mini-UNIX (a little
>>> known
>>> thing, but a genuine Bell Labs one):
>>>
>>>   http://www.tavi.co.uk/unixhistory/mini-unix.html
>>
>> Cool. Thanks for the link.
>>
>>    Johnny
>
> Whilst all these suggestions may work, I can't really see any point in
> running anything other than VMS on my VAXs. That is what they were
> bought for, that is what I have always done.
>
> Given the lack of a legal OS I am quite inclined to send them to the
> re-cyclers to be crushed and scrapped.
>
> This would appear to be my only legal way to dispose of them

Why would you say that? As has been pointed out here there is
at least one legitimate option. If you don't want to run anything
but VMS find someone who will take them to run Unix. No reason
to destroy them other than spite.

>
> Thank you HP for "letting me go" and then destroying one of my few
> remaining pleasures...
>

HP did nothing that hasn't been the industry standard for as long
as I have been in this business.

bill

On 2022-01-06, David Wade <g4ugm@dave.invalid> wrote:
>
> Whilst all these suggestions may work, I can't really see any point in
> running anything other than VMS on my VAXs. That is what they were
> bought for, that is what I have always done.
>

I agree. I'm on the verge of just deleting my simh instances and moving on.
I was hoping there was some unique OS (just like the HelenOS example I
posted about earlier) that actually ran on VAX but nothing has emerged.

Running older generic versions of Unix isn't something that appeals to
me because the OS is just a tool to me unless it's got something unique
about it (like VMS) that deserves to be explored in its own right.

Simon.

--
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.

On 1/6/22 4:33 AM, David Wade wrote:
> Given the lack of a legal OS I am quite inclined to send them to the
> re-cyclers to be crushed and scrapped.

Why do that?

I guarantee that there are people who would be interested in acquiring
the hardware.

There are probably people that have perpetual license PAKs that would
happily run on them.

There are probably people that will run *BSD on them.

--
Grant. . . .
unix || die

On 01/05/22 13:28, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2022-01-04, chris<chris-nospam@tridac.net> wrote:
>>
>> Xinu was an educational OS written by Doug Comer at Purdue to teach
>> os classes. For the original system, it was assumed that a Vax
>> running BSD 4.3 or similar, typically a 750 class machine, did the
>> development, and a pdp11 target machine to run the developed code.
>>
>> It was quite complete for it's time and was interested enough to
>> buy the book and later x86 and 68000 versions that ran on pc or sun 3
>> hardware. Not really a mainstream OS, whatever Wiki says...
>>
>
> There are a number of academic created operating systems that are
> interesting in their own right. None run on VAX however. :-)
>
> Here's one I look at every so often:
>
> http://www.helenos.org/
>
> Simon.
>

A bit late getting back to this, but that looks quite interesting.
Message passing design has been my favourite ipc method for some
time now. Have written a simple round robin, run to completion
task scheduler where each task is a state machine that waits for
the next message, doing nothing otherwise. Specifically for low
resource embedded work, completely in C, with no asm low level
context switching, so completely portable. A sort of proof of
concept idea and have used it for one of my own projects.

I try to keep up with the mainstream OS development, releases
and typically evaluate several over thw course of each year. Recent
examples include Open Solaris Hipster, (very well sorted) and
Devuan Linux, sans systemd. There is also SmartOs from Joyent,
a hypervisor that combines features of Open Solaris with Linux
KVM to provide a virtualisation environment, with templates for
each OS hosted. Did a quick install recently, took less than half
an hour and will revisit that later in the year. FreeBSD is still
the goto OS for most work here at present though...

Chris

On 1/4/2022 6:40 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>
>
> Too bad they never did a port of Plan9 for the VAX.  :-)
>

Old subject, but I was doing some research and found some
interesting stuff.

Seems there actually was a port of Plan9 for the the VAX. :-)
Sadly, all references today say the sources have all been lost.

But, continuing this thread, there also was a port of Amoeba
for the VAX. I haven't looked yet but although they would be
very old I think sources may still exist.

How's this for a concept. Revive VAX Amoeba. Then build an
Amoeba Distributed System with all the remaining Hobbyist
VAXen. :-)

bill

> How's this for a concept. Revive VAX Amoeba. Then build an
> Amoeba Distributed System with all the remaining Hobbyist
> VAXen. :-)

Bonus points for using a VAXstation 100 to access the Amoeba network. :)

De

On 5/17/2023 12:02 PM, Dennis Boone wrote:
> > How's this for a concept. Revive VAX Amoeba. Then build an
> > Amoeba Distributed System with all the remaining Hobbyist
> > VAXen. :-)
>
> Bonus points for using a VAXstation 100 to access the Amoeba network. :)

I had never heard about VAXstation 100 before.

Per Wikipedia it is an X terminal using a M68K processor
not a VAX processor that connects to a VAX using Unibus.

Arne

> Per Wikipedia it is an X terminal using a M68K processor
> not a VAX processor that connects to a VAX using Unibus.

Exactly. And Lars has been working on an emulator.

De

In article <kck65mF4ceU1@mid.individual.net>,
bill <bill.gunshannon@gmail.com> wrote:
>On 1/4/2022 6:40 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>
>>
>> Too bad they never did a port of Plan9 for the VAX.  :-)
>>
>
>
>Old subject, but I was doing some research and found some
>interesting stuff.
>
>Seems there actually was a port of Plan9 for the the VAX. :-)
>Sadly, all references today say the sources have all been lost.

Yes. VAX was the first machine that plan9 ran on.
However, it was a short-lived portf or a very early
version of the system, and they did not stick with
it: even then, they realized that the future lay
elsewhere.

>But, continuing this thread, there also was a port of Amoeba
>for the VAX. I haven't looked yet but although they would be
>very old I think sources may still exist.
>
>How's this for a concept. Revive VAX Amoeba. Then build an
>Amoeba Distributed System with all the remaining Hobbyist
>VAXen. :-)

Phffft....

- Dan C.