[Info-vax] vax vms licenses

[Simon Clubley]

On 2022-04-26, gah4 <gah4 at u.washington.edu> wrote:
> On Tuesday, April 26, 2022 at 1:28:10 AM UTC-7, John Dallman wrote:
>
> (snip)
>
>> As an additional logistical point, open-sourcing VMS while building it 
>> requires using out-of-production Itanium servers would be suicidal: it 
>> has to be sustainable on commodity hardware first. 
>
> DEC nicely released the 36 bit OS for us to use, though with only
> (from them) out of production hardware.   I am not so sure when
> emulators came out, but it would not have been hard to write one
> by then. 
>
> I suspect VAX is nicer to write an emulator for than Alpha or Itanium,
> but all are possible to keep VMS running on new hardware.
>

There are full system emulators for all architectures I am aware of
apart from Itanium, which should tell you something. I once spent a
weekend looking at the possibility of writing one, and came to the
conclusion of basically "forget that!".

Even with the initial help from Ski for the instruction set component,
writing an Itanium emulator would be a massive job and not all the
required bits and knowledge are freely available.

For example, you can no longer freely download the Itanium firmware
that such an emulator would require.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.