[Info-vax] vax vms licenses

[Jan-Erik Söderholm]

Den 2022-04-26 kl. 20:11, skrev Dave Froble:
> On 4/26/2022 1:09 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> I don't see anything like that?
> 
> What can itanic do that Alpha cannot?  It's a shared code base.

You can lookup he SPD's or similar. There are a lot of tools
that are available on IA64 but not on Alpha.