[Info-vax] VSI OpenVMS Hobbyist Program Announced.

[osuvman50 at gmail.com]

When I investigated the free Alpha emulators 6-7 years ago, FreeAXP compared
unfavorably to the Stromasys offering. It was slower and less stable, but they've
continued to make new releases (last was last November) so maybe they've made
improvements. The real deal breaker, though, was the limited memory -- 128 MB is
not good for anything beyond showing people what a DCL prompt looks like.

My emulated DS20 hasn't done anything since last booted a couple weeks ago but run
a nightly job to update a 20MB SQLite database from data files read via NFS and
it's using 300 MB (2/3s being file cache). PersonalAlpha started at 512MB, but
they later accepted that 1GB was the minimum viable configuration.