[Info-vax] vax vms licenses

[Simon Clubley]

On 2022-04-26, Dave Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

Read the original quote above. Itanium is currently used for things
that Alpha cannot be used for.

Of course, that ceases to be a problem once everything, including
building VMS itself (and the compilers), is running natively on x86-64 VMS.

Simon.

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