[Info-vax] vax vms licenses

[Dave Froble]

On 4/26/2022 8:09 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> 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.
>

If emulators for building VMS is the issue, Alpha emulators already exist. 
Don't need no stinkin itanic.

-- 
David Froble                       Tel: 724-529-0450
Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc.      E-Mail: davef at tsoft-inc.com
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