[Info-vax] Prices of Microvax 3100's

[Wilm Boerhout]

David Froble mentioned  on 3-5-2012 23:34:
> 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?

The list of services to be disabled is documented with CHARON-VAX and 
CHARON-AXP. For the bold, it is just a checkbox at the end of the CHARON 
installation procedure. I've used it many times with no ill effects.

/Wilm [Note: I'm also a CHARON reseller]