[Info-vax] vax vms licenses

[Dave Froble]

On 4/26/2022 5:57 PM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
> 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.
>

You don't seem to be missing them ...

:-)

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