[Info-vax] Prices of Microvax 3100's

[David Froble]

John Wallace wrote:
> On May 3, 2:59 pm, koeh... at eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org (Bob
> Koehler) wrote:
>> In article <0c85168b-2bb2-413c-b27a-214935e8d... at w7g2000vbg.googlegroups.com>, AEF <spamsink2... at yahoo.com> writes:
>>
>>
>>
>>> So why not run Charon or SIMH? Speaking of which -- and please pardon
>>> me if this is a stupid question -- do these things run as a separate
>>> process or do they take over the entire machine? I don't see why it
>>> can't be the former. Just making sure.
>>    SIMH is just an ordinary application as far as I've seen.  It can
>>    be a significant CPU load, but I've been able to timeshare with it
>>    on all the desktop OS I've tried it with.
> 
> SIMH can be greedy, as can others, but the main issue with coexistence
> is likely not the behaviours of the VMS-hosting emulator application,
> but the behaviour of Windows and Windows-based applications on Windows
> systems, and in in particular the impact of any undesirable behaviour
> on VMS and the applications in the VMS environment. (I hope that
> sentence made sense).
> 
> That's why from time to time you see people round here asking about
> Linux versions of the emulators and why at least one of the emulators
> has a version that runs on QNX, the realtime OS. If the host OS has to
> be Windows then it's presumably safest to treat the Window box as a
> single purpose box but that isn't really much of a guarantee of good
> behaviour, especially in the presence of the stuff usually associated
> with a Window box of any kind.

Stan Quayle was re-selling Charon, and according to what he wrote in the past, windoz 
wasn't a problem.  What he indicated happened was shutting down many of the services that 
normally come enabled in a windoz distribution.  He also indicated that they ran windoz on 
one CPU, and dedicated another to the emulator.  So, you had a decent CPU dedicated to 
nothing but the emulator, which I guess gave some decent performance.

What I haven't seen is a chart of what windoz services were needed, and what ones could be 
disabled.  Sure would be better than everyone having to re-discover that information by 
trial and error.

If you shut off enough of the bloated services on windoz, I've got to wonder how close one 
can come to a real real-time OS?