[Info-vax] Unix on A DEC Vax?

[Stanley F. Quayle]

> My cell phone probably has significantly more computing power and far more memory and storage than this "minicomputer",

I have SIMH on my Android phone.  Fun to work with, but not really practical -- it doesn't access the WIFI network interface.  If it did, it could be useful, sort of.


> And the time needed to run a particular CPU test on an emulator will always reveal that it is slower than running native code on the host CPU.

Would you expect an emulator to test as *faster* than native code?


> Having seen the speed of shadow copies under SimH and the free Alpha
emulators the improved disk speeds are no surprise.  Is the full backup
time for CHARON-VAX quoted on your web page to tape or disk?

As I recall, he's backing up to virtual tape.  That becomes a file in Windows, which is then archived to storage elsewhere using standard Windows tools.


> eat a CPU

True, emulating a different processor is a full-time job.  CHARON comes with a "slowdown" kernel widget that stops the interpreter when the emulated CPU is idle.  I've read discussions about SIMH doing the same thing, although I don't know if it ever came to pass.