[Info-vax] State of the OpenVMS hobbyist program?

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 11/21/19 8:46 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2019-11-21, seasoned_geek <roland at logikalsolutions.com> wrote:
>> On Wednesday, November 20, 2019 at 12:03:08 PM UTC-6, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>
>>> Bitsavers has a lot of it, but I still have quite a bit of paper
>>> documentation for RT-11 and RSTS.
>>>
>> RSTS/E is sexy!
> 
> No, RSTS/E was ok for its time, but is inferior to what VMS later offered.

Well, of course it is.  And V5 Unix is inferior to current generation
FreeBSD.  But, it could have continued to be developed and it could even
have been ported to the VAX instead of creating VMS.  I knew places that
were still running RSTS for very serious production use well into the
90's.

> 
> What would have been more interesting however is if someone had made
> a portable version of RSX from scratch (written in a high level language
> using RSX-like APIs and UI but without any of the DEC code) that would
> have run on modern embedded hardware.

That is what I would like to do with RSTS/E.  Purely academic as neither
of them stands a chance of ever being accepted in the IT world today.

> 
> That could have found a home in today's small embedded systems.

There actually is an interesting port of RSX.  Never having been a
fan of RSX I haven't tried it yet but I do have the needed hardware
and do plan on trying it sometime.  Who knows, maybe there are some
tidbits in the ported version of the source to do the port of RSTS
I always wanted to see.

bill