[Info-vax] VAX VMS going forward

[Terry Kennedy]

On Tuesday, July 28, 2020 at 6:57:55 PM UTC-4, David Goodwin wrote:
> Yep, and I really wish that wasn't the case. I very much wish companies would just release the source for discontinued products instead of lock them away where they can benefit no one until the copyrights eventually expire in a century or so.

The problem wit VAX/VMS is that it shares a lot of common code with still marketed/supported products like the Alpha, Itanium and x86 VMS platforms. While it is true that VAX/VMS went EoL/EoS at V7.3, there is a lot of stuff that hasn't been touched since then by the other VMS platforms. The situation is a little different from the other VMS platforms as VAX was it's own separate code base, while Alpha, Itanium and x86 are built from the same source files via conditional. This is probably because Alpha was the first port of VMS away from VAX and DEC took their time and had several stages of the Alpha port before feature parity was achieved and version numbers synchronized. Neither of the subsequent ports (Itanium, x86) had the luxury of the multi-year 'learning experience' that VAX -> Alpha had, and also once that first port was done, a lot of experience was gained that let the process happen faster and use a single code base for all platforms. 

> I'd love to get my hands on a PDP-11 someday (I've got a set of 8" RT-11 disks and a few binders of documentation) but I've never managed to track one down in New Zealand.

Take a look at the PiDP-11, a kit that gives you a 2/3 scale PDP-11/70 with working lights and switches. The emulation is handled by a Raspberry Pi running a modified version of simh that knows how to interact with the physical front panel. https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11