[Info-vax] Unix on A DEC Vax?

[Stanley F. Quayle]

Hoff, I don't understand what you mean when you say an emulator is slow.  The various commercial emulators are faster than their physical counterparts.  No, it's not a VAX running with a 3 GHz clock, but it is still faster.

The important part is how well the customer's application runs.  A lot of the big wins are in improved disk speed.  I have a customer (www.stanq.com/wf1) that reduced their backup time by a factor of 8.  The only complaint was that the users thought the system was "too fast".

As for an emulator being a temporary fix, there are lots of customers that rely on corner-cases in VAX floating-point operations.  They're stuck on an emulator.

There are customers that have instruction-time dependence.  There are hardware emulators for them (at least for VAX and PDP-11).  Expensive, but if they really need it, they need it.

And there's a big chunk of my customers that want to get new hardware but don't want to change anything.  Re-training users for some new application can be really expensive.  And some have tried to develop a Windows or Linux replacement, and failed horribly.

The FDA, FAA, DOD, NRC, etc. have been accepting emulators as valid replacements for physical systems.  Re-qualifying an application can cost thousands, if not millions, of dollars.