[Info-vax] Prices of Microvax 3100's

[David Froble]

John Wallace wrote:
> On May 3, 10:34 pm, David Froble <da... at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>> 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?
> 
> "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?"
> 
> You can try it but what chances are there that it will work, or if it
> does, that the next Windows Update or AV Update or whatever will break
> something? Realistically it can't be meaningfully done with a Window
> box, with or without CHARON. Stan sells QNX as a CHARON host for when
> realtime matters.
> 
> My experience says you can come pretty close to what a lot of people
> (but not everyone) would class as realtime with a suitably configured
> Linux. There's lots of stuff you can readily configure, and if it's
> not configurable enough or doesn't do what you want, you get the
> source and can have someone change it.

I probably phrased that poorly.  I never intended to imply that windoz could ever be a 
real-time system.  Was just wondering that if it was only doing what you wanted it to do, 
how reasonable would it be.

No sense talking about updates.  Once I got a system doing what I wanted, I'd see no 
reason to do any updates.

I looked at a Linux distribution a few weeks ago.  (Ubunta)  Was hopelessly lost.  Got it 
on a CD that is bootable, into a GUI interface.  Didn't even know how to get to a command 
line environment.  Didn't even see enough to be "not impressed".