[Info-vax] X86 first boot? - A Really Stupid Question

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-04-01 21:02:54 +0000, Ben Lambert said:

> On Monday, 1 April 2019 07:59:49 UTC-7, Stephen Hoffman  wrote:
>> On 2019-03-31 23:58:44 +0000, Simon Clubley said:
>> 
>>> Is the Writing OpenVMS Alpha Device Drivers in C book still the  
>>> starting point for Itanium ?
>> 
>> That's the "latest" edition.
> 
> Nope, there was a 2nd edition released in 1999, updated to support OpenVMS 7.3

That second edition* doesn't cover Itanium, nor will it cover x86-64.

Hardware coverage which was seemingly the core of Simon's question.

Same for the DCL book and various other increasingly-dated OpenVMS 
tomes, though most of the other OpenVMS books are less 
hardware-specific.

There's not much in the way of new OpenVMS documentation from HPE or 
VSI or third-party writers and publishers.

While rebranding and other work and a conversion to docbook processes 
was reportedly underway, VSI hasn't revealed a documentation strategy 
or plans, and hasn't re-issued all that much.  They've been quite busy 
elsewhere, after all.

And as has been discussed recently, classic printed books are going to 
be very expensive for something akin to OpenVMS.  Or they'll be ebooks. 
 Or both.

Been pondering what might happen with iBooks documents created for 
OpenVMS materials, though that'd require readers to have a Mac or iOS 
device to view the contents.  That might not be a popular prerequisite.


*Ignoring the 1999 publication and the V7.3 2001-era release schedule 
discussion.





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