[Info-vax] Unix on A DEC Vax?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2013-01-16 17:00:02 +0000, haziz said:

> I just picked up a DEC Vaxstation 90 with a built in CDROM and an 
> auxiliary SCSI storage module with tape drive.... I may explore VMS 
> also at some point.


Yes, there are VAX distros of Unix.  <http://openbsd.org/vax.html> is one.

Web searches will find you some other Unix ports and projects, but VAX 
hardware is fairly old and comparatively rare these days.

I'd suggest starting with OpenVMS VAX here, and not with Unix.  The 
OpenVMS VAX hobbyist licenses are free, the VAX distros are free to 
download from HP and then burn to some local CD-R drive, and the VAX 
documentation is available; see <http://www.openvms.org/hobbyist> and 
<http://www.hp.com/go/openvms/doc> here.

Why not start with Unix?  Because Unix is more or less the sorta-same 
everywhere and you already know it, where OpenVMS will probably be 
unlike anything you've encountered or experienced before.  If you want 
to experience something completely different, OpenVMS VAX is your path.

Yes, you can dual-boot with more than one disk, assuming you have 
multiple disks present.  VMS gets a whole disk.  Unix gets a whole 
disk.  VMS doesn't do partitioning.

emacs isn't something I follow, but there are at least microemacs 
distros around (for VMS).  For Unix, I'd assume there are emacs distros.

OpenVMS Hobbyist Intro <http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/23> — and yes, 
there are other resources around, too.


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