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by xradionut 4530 days ago
VAXen to play with? What type of hardware you running on? I vaguely remember VMS and DCL from the late 80's and early 90's, we had terminals everywhere on the floor and in the fab.
2 comments
Hoff 4530 days ago
The Deathrow cluster offers a demo account and (free) accounts to an OpenVMS V8.4 cluster; on an Alpha and an Itanium. Some of the old VMS games are available online there, as well. http://deathrow.vistech.net

If you want to re-live VMS on your own x86 hardware, the simh emulator (free) includes VAX support. There are various other emulators available. http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/70

For OpenVMS, HP offers (free) OpenVMS hobbyist licenses and disk image downloads for all three OpenVMS architectures; for VAX, Alpha and Itanium. http://www.openvms.org/Hobbyist

Here's a setup of a (slightly older) version of simh on OS X: http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/922

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ChuckMcM 4530 days ago
I happen to have one each of all but one of every QBUS based VAX DEC made (maybe too, the MicroVax I's location is in question). Also a half dozen VTxx terminals, although the fun ones are the VT340's that do REGiS color graphics. People started sending them to the dump in 1998 because they weren't "Y2K compliant" and DEC wouldn't sign off on non-current hardware ...
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xradionut 4530 days ago
I was given a bunch of DG gear around Y2K. Kept a couple of Aviion boards to hang on the office wall after having to purge the system collection before moving.

As much as I love old gear, my interests are currently more modern. Still I'd like to put an OS on a smaller system, either ARM or MIPS. ST has a nice new Discovery kit that as a 2.4" QVGA TFT LCD and would serve has a radio controller prototype.

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ChuckMcM 4530 days ago
Aren't those cool? (the STM discovery boards) I got one of the original butterfly boards ($15 from Digikey) and then one of the DISCO boards (the one with the LCD) at ARM TechCon. I then started a Google+ "community" (Cortex M Developers) and started using (and trying to improve in small ways) libopencm3 (see it on Github http://github.com/libopencm3/libopencm3). Lots of folks are using these boards, they are pretty awesome.
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