Just an FYI.

I recently ran VMS (5.5-2) as a VaxStation 3100M38 under OpenSimH on a
Raspberry Pi 5!.

I got VUPS rating of 30 or 31 from VUPs.com and VUPs2.com. Not bad on a
credit card sized computer for £60!

It ran a digital mapping application from the 1980s successfully, other
than a long-standing font corruption problem in the GPX device simulation.

Regards,

On 11/12/2023 3:41 PM, Paul Hardy wrote:
> I recently ran VMS (5.5-2) as a VaxStation 3100M38 under OpenSimH on a
> Raspberry Pi 5!.
>
> I got VUPS rating of 30 or 31 from VUPs.com and VUPs2.com. Not bad on a
> credit card sized computer for £60!

The IT world has evolved.

What would 30 780's have costed 45 years ago?

Arne

On 12/11/2023 20:41, Paul Hardy wrote:
>
>
> Just an FYI.
>
> I recently ran VMS (5.5-2) as a VaxStation 3100M38 under OpenSimH on a
> Raspberry Pi 5!.
>
> I got VUPS rating of 30 or 31 from VUPs.com and VUPs2.com. Not bad on a
> credit card sized computer for £60!
>

How does that compare with a real VAX or a PDP/11?
My impression of a Pi Zero is that it would knock a PDP/11 into the
middle of next week, and then some.

--
There is nothing a fleet of dispatchable nuclear power plants cannot do
that cannot be done worse and more expensively and with higher carbon
emissions and more adverse environmental impact by adding intermittent
renewable energy.

On 12/11/2023 21:05, The Natural Philosopher wrote

> My impression of a Pi Zero is that it would knock a PDP/11 into the
> middle of next week, and then some.
>

Yeah, I would have expected 100s or 1000s of VUPS.

On Sun, 12 Nov 2023 21:43:35 +0000, Pancho wrote:

> On 12/11/2023 21:05, The Natural Philosopher wrote
>
>> My impression of a Pi Zero is that it would knock a PDP/11 into the
>> middle of next week, and then some.
>>
>>
> Yeah, I would have expected 100s or 1000s of VUPS.

On an emulator?

On Sun, 12 Nov 2023 21:05:02 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> On 12/11/2023 20:41, Paul Hardy wrote:
>>
>>
>> Just an FYI.
>>
>> I recently ran VMS (5.5-2) as a VaxStation 3100M38 under OpenSimH on a
>> Raspberry Pi 5!.
>>
>> I got VUPS rating of 30 or 31 from VUPs.com and VUPs2.com. Not bad on a
>> credit card sized computer for £60!
>>
>>
> How does that compare with a real VAX or a PDP/11?
> My impression of a Pi Zero is that it would knock a PDP/11 into the
> middle of next week, and then some.

A VAX 11/780 defined 1 VUP.

On Sun, 12 Nov 2023 21:05:02 +0000
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> On 12/11/2023 20:41, Paul Hardy wrote:
> >
> >
> > Just an FYI.
> >
> > I recently ran VMS (5.5-2) as a VaxStation 3100M38 under OpenSimH on a
> > Raspberry Pi 5!.
> >
> > I got VUPS rating of 30 or 31 from VUPs.com and VUPs2.com. Not bad on a
> > credit card sized computer for £60!
> >
>
> How does that compare with a real VAX or a PDP/11?

One VUPS is supposed to be one original VAX CPU running VMS.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

On Sun, 12 Nov 2023 21:43:35 +0000
Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me> wrote:

> On 12/11/2023 21:05, The Natural Philosopher wrote
>
> > My impression of a Pi Zero is that it would knock a PDP/11 into the
> > middle of next week, and then some.
> >
>
> Yeah, I would have expected 100s or 1000s of VUPS.

Running native sure, but it's running a software emulated processor.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

On 11/12/23 3:41 PM, Paul Hardy wrote:
>
>
> Just an FYI.
>
> I recently ran VMS (5.5-2) as a VaxStation 3100M38 under OpenSimH on a
> Raspberry Pi 5!.

Ok ... impressed !

> I got VUPS rating of 30 or 31 from VUPs.com and VUPs2.com. Not bad on a
> credit card sized computer for £60!
>
> It ran a digital mapping application from the 1980s successfully, other
> than a long-standing font corruption problem in the GPX device simulation.

I always liked VMS - well ahead of its time.
HOPING some basement-dwelling guru will create
a Pi-runnable version with some more "modern"
features added.

Hey, there's a Plan-9 for Pi ... there could be
a VMS as well !

BUT - where did you get the OS images ? They USED
to be available but the current owners pulled them
off the net years ago.

On Sun, 12 Nov 2023 22:48:31 -0500
"56d.1152" <56d.1152@ztq9.net> wrote:

> I always liked VMS - well ahead of its time.
> HOPING some basement-dwelling guru will create
> a Pi-runnable version with some more "modern"
> features added.
>
> Hey, there's a Plan-9 for Pi ... there could be
> a VMS as well !

Plan 9 was designed to be portable and released as source code. VMS
was designed for the VAX and while it has been ported to the PC the source
code has not been released. Any port to the Pi would have to be done by VMS
Software who make their money selling commercial VMS licenses.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

On 12/11/2023 21:47, Bob Eager wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Nov 2023 21:43:35 +0000, Pancho wrote:
>
>> On 12/11/2023 21:05, The Natural Philosopher wrote
>>
>>> My impression of a Pi Zero is that it would knock a PDP/11 into the
>>> middle of next week, and then some.
>>>
>>>
>> Yeah, I would have expected 100s or 1000s of VUPS.
>
> On an emulator?

More than 30.

I don't really know the performance penalty of emulators. AIUI a lot of
the performance improvement of modern computers is due to software,
working with pipelines, predictive branching, etc. Processor clock is
only about 1000 times faster.

I first learnt of RISC when I was given a DECstation 3100 (Mips/Ultrix
not a VAXStation) to work on. Circa 1991. Much faster than VMS, but
already losing the battle to the PC.

On 11/13/2023 5:26 AM, Pancho wrote:
> On 12/11/2023 21:47, Bob Eager wrote:
>> On Sun, 12 Nov 2023 21:43:35 +0000, Pancho wrote:
>>
>>> On 12/11/2023 21:05, The Natural Philosopher wrote
>>>
>>>> My impression of a Pi Zero is that it would knock a PDP/11 into the
>>>> middle of next week, and then some.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Yeah, I would have expected 100s or 1000s of VUPS.
>>
>> On an emulator?
>
> More than 30.
>
> I don't really know the performance penalty of emulators.

The overhead of a non-JIT instruction set emulation
must be huge.

Arne

On Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:26:30 +0000, Pancho wrote:

> On 12/11/2023 21:47, Bob Eager wrote:
>> On Sun, 12 Nov 2023 21:43:35 +0000, Pancho wrote:
>>
>>> On 12/11/2023 21:05, The Natural Philosopher wrote
>>>
>>>> My impression of a Pi Zero is that it would knock a PDP/11 into the
>>>> middle of next week, and then some.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Yeah, I would have expected 100s or 1000s of VUPS.
>>
>> On an emulator?
>
> More than 30.

That's a more realistic figure, and what has been observed (by me).

Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
>>
>> How does that compare with a real VAX or a PDP/11?
>
> One VUPS is supposed to be one original VAX CPU running VMS.

Right, so this is about a Vax 6000 or so, right?

Note that the Raspberry Pi has a whole lot more I/O bandwidth than
comparable 32-bit DEC systems, so the performance will actually be better
than the VUPS measurement would indicate.

Mind you, the I/O bandwidth on the vax systems was pretty pitiful and they
should never have discontinued the Decsystem-20....

But when the computer security people ask me to describe a raspberry pi,
I explain to them that it's about the performance of an old vax, except
that it fits in your shirt pocket.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

On 13 Nov 2023 16:26:19 -0000
kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

> But when the computer security people ask me to describe a raspberry pi,
> I explain to them that it's about the performance of an old vax, except
> that it fits in your shirt pocket.

More like the performance of an old Cray when it's running native
code.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

On 2023-11-13, Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> wrote:

> On 11/13/2023 5:26 AM, Pancho wrote:
>
>> I don't really know the performance penalty of emulators.
>
> The overhead of a non-JIT instruction set emulation
> must be huge.

Back in my Amiga days, I played with the Transformer, a
software emulation of an 8088 on a 68000. It would run
MS-DOS, but very slowly - I figured about a 10x slowdown.
Once just for giggles I ran Z80MU (a Z80 emulation for
MS-DOS) under the Transformer. Under these two levels
of emulation I fired up the CP/M BASIC interpreter and
typed "PRINT SIN(whatever)". It came back with the
correct answer - 7 seconds later.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | The Internet is like a big city:
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | it has plenty of bright lights and
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | excitement, but also dark alleys
/ \ if you read it the right way. | down which the unwary get mugged.

On 13/11/2023 17:32, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2023-11-13, Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>
>> On 11/13/2023 5:26 AM, Pancho wrote:
>>
>>> I don't really know the performance penalty of emulators.
>>
>> The overhead of a non-JIT instruction set emulation
>> must be huge.
>
> Back in my Amiga days, I played with the Transformer, a
> software emulation of an 8088 on a 68000. It would run
> MS-DOS, but very slowly - I figured about a 10x slowdown.
> Once just for giggles I ran Z80MU (a Z80 emulation for
> MS-DOS) under the Transformer. Under these two levels
> of emulation I fired up the CP/M BASIC interpreter and
> typed "PRINT SIN(whatever)". It came back with the
> correct answer - 7 seconds later.
>

That sounds like the Sinclair scientific calculator in the early 70s

--
Chris

On 13/11/2023 15:12, Bob Eager wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:26:30 +0000, Pancho wrote:
>
>> On 12/11/2023 21:47, Bob Eager wrote:
>>> On Sun, 12 Nov 2023 21:43:35 +0000, Pancho wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 12/11/2023 21:05, The Natural Philosopher wrote
>>>>
>>>>> My impression of a Pi Zero is that it would knock a PDP/11 into the
>>>>> middle of next week, and then some.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> Yeah, I would have expected 100s or 1000s of VUPS.
>>>
>>> On an emulator?
>>
>> More than 30.
>
> That's a more realistic figure, and what has been observed (by me).

Observed figures are always more realistic, they are, after all, real.

Apparently, my rPi5 has arrived today, but I'm not going to test the
emulator. I'm happy to leave the VMS part of my life, in the past.

Looking back on it now. I think the strangest thing about VMS was the
Manual Set.

On Monday, November 13, 2023 at 4:50:06 AM UTC-8, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 11/13/2023 5:26 AM, Pancho wrote:
> > On 12/11/2023 21:47, Bob Eager wrote:
> >> On Sun, 12 Nov 2023 21:43:35 +0000, Pancho wrote:
> >>> On 12/11/2023 21:05, The Natural Philosopher wrote
> >>>
> >>>> My impression of a Pi Zero is that it would knock a PDP/11 into the
> >>>> middle of next week, and then some.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>> Yeah, I would have expected 100s or 1000s of VUPS.
> >>
> >> On an emulator?
> >
> > More than 30.
> >
> > I don't really know the performance penalty of emulators.
> The overhead of a non-JIT instruction set emulation
> must be huge.

Absolutely. Looking at the VUPS script, it's really only benchmarking DCL's ability to loop using an IF test and a GOTO. It's not using any floating-point, which would be interesting since VAX FP has to be emulated. So you're testing a language interpreter inside an emulator.

On my Xeon W-1290P @ 3.70GHz (base clock), running OpenVMS natively, I get a max VUPS of 907.0. I wouldn't be surprised if this improves when the OS is recompiled with native compilers with optimization enabled. It's an interesting data point, but a very limited one since the test is so tiny and unrepresentative of real workloads.

On Monday, November 13, 2023 at 9:44:19 AM UTC-8, Pancho wrote:
> On 13/11/2023 15:12, Bob Eager wrote:
> >
> > That's a more realistic figure, and what has been observed (by me).
> Observed figures are always more realistic, they are, after all, real.
>
> Apparently, my rPi5 has arrived today, but I'm not going to test the
> emulator. I'm happy to leave the VMS part of my life, in the past.
>
> Looking back on it now. I think the strangest thing about VMS was the
> Manual Set.

Why is it strange that so much printed documentation was released with VMS? To me, the real strangeness is in learning all the proprietary APIs documented in all of those printed manuals. :) Thank goodness HP made all the documentation available in PDF form and often HTML as well for free in the early 2000's. The current VSI docs site is even better, with better HTML rendering of the original documents.

On Mon, 13 Nov 2023 17:32:45 GMT
Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:

> Back in my Amiga days, I played with the Transformer, a
> software emulation of an 8088 on a 68000. It would run
> MS-DOS, but very slowly - I figured about a 10x slowdown.
> Once just for giggles I ran Z80MU (a Z80 emulation for
> MS-DOS) under the Transformer. Under these two levels
> of emulation I fired up the CP/M BASIC interpreter and
> typed "PRINT SIN(whatever)". It came back with the
> correct answer - 7 seconds later.

There's a PC emulation written in JavaScript that can boot Linux
(slowly). Presumably it would be possible to run Hercules in it and produce
a truly painfully slow mainframe emulation.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

On Mon, 13 Nov 2023 16:26:19 +0000, Scott Dorsey wrote:

> Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> How does that compare with a real VAX or a PDP/11?
>>
>> One VUPS is supposed to be one original VAX CPU running VMS.
>
> Right, so this is about a Vax 6000 or so, right?

No. Original VAX. An 11/780.

A VAX 6000 (one CPU) was about 7 VUPs, as I recall.

On 11/13/2023 4:03 PM, Bob Eager wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Nov 2023 16:26:19 +0000, Scott Dorsey wrote:
>> Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> How does that compare with a real VAX or a PDP/11?
>>>
>>> One VUPS is supposed to be one original VAX CPU running VMS.
>>
>> Right, so this is about a Vax 6000 or so, right?
>
> No. Original VAX. An 11/780.
>
> A VAX 6000 (one CPU) was about 7 VUPs, as I recall.

I think he meant that the VAX 6000 was about 30 VUPS.

It depends on what 6000. A 6n0 is 32 VUPS but a 4n0 is 7 VUPS.

Arne

On Mon, 13 Nov 2023 16:06:59 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> On 11/13/2023 4:03 PM, Bob Eager wrote:
>> On Mon, 13 Nov 2023 16:26:19 +0000, Scott Dorsey wrote:
>>> Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> How does that compare with a real VAX or a PDP/11?
>>>>
>>>> One VUPS is supposed to be one original VAX CPU running VMS.
>>>
>>> Right, so this is about a Vax 6000 or so, right?
>>
>> No. Original VAX. An 11/780.
>>
>> A VAX 6000 (one CPU) was about 7 VUPs, as I recall.
>
> I think he meant that the VAX 6000 was about 30 VUPS.
>
> It depends on what 6000. A 6n0 is 32 VUPS but a 4n0 is 7 VUPS.

Is that a single CPU, as I stated?

On Mon, 13 Nov 2023 17:36:53 +0000, Chris Townley wrote:

> On 13/11/2023 17:32, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>> On 2023-11-13, Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>
>>> On 11/13/2023 5:26 AM, Pancho wrote:
>>>
>>>> I don't really know the performance penalty of emulators.
>>>
>>> The overhead of a non-JIT instruction set emulation must be huge.
>>
>> Back in my Amiga days, I played with the Transformer, a software
>> emulation of an 8088 on a 68000. It would run MS-DOS, but very slowly
>> - I figured about a 10x slowdown.
>> Once just for giggles I ran Z80MU (a Z80 emulation for MS-DOS) under
>> the Transformer. Under these two levels of emulation I fired up the
>> CP/M BASIC interpreter and typed "PRINT SIN(whatever)". It came back
>> with the correct answer - 7 seconds later.
>>
>>
> That sounds like the Sinclair scientific calculator in the early 70s

I had one of the really small 4 function calculators in 1975. IIRC it
wasn't all that slow (similar speed to a slide rule if each calculation
required both slide and cursor to be moved for each calculation) but its
main drawbacks was being really too small and fiddly, I used to be pretty
good with the mechanical, electrically driven FACIT desktop calculators
and I'd say the Sinclairs were just a little faster than those Facits.

However, I got an HP 21 (RPN0 calculator in 1977 and that was much faster
AND much stronger and better made: still have it and it still works, but
got an HP 21 (programmable too). That got replaced by an HP 28s in 1990
and is still in daily use.

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org