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altivoAn amazing two, count them, sunny days in a row. Still on the chilly side for May, but I'll take it. Apple trees are in full bloom now, so let's not be having any more frost or ice storms, OK? Last year that happened and the apple crop was pitifully small as a result.
Slowish day, so I took advantage of spare moments to reinstall the SIMH VAXServer emulation with OpenVMS 7.3. The VAXServer emulation runs at reasonable speed once it's set up, but doing the installation of the OS with all the attendant decompressing of packed files does take a while.
This time I have networking set up properly, after discovering that the prepackaged SIMH was compiled without network features. No wonder it just wouldn't configure to use UCX no matter what I tried. Now it works, and talks to both the local network and the internet. This means I can keep a virtual VAX running and open a terminal session on it from another machine. Since my Alpha DS10 at work has been tied up for several months now acting as a "temporary" replacement for a dead proxy server, and with the budget crunch I don't expect a new server to show up any time soon, this is a good thing. Now I have VMS back at work and at home.
Admittedly, I have far more years of IBM mainframe experience than I have with VMS, and I can run IBM's MVS under emulation too. Hercules does a darned good job of that. But VMS networks much more easily, so it integrates with the other environments we use. MVS is from the days when mainframes took up entire buildings and didn't yet deign to speak with mere pipsqueak desktop machines. Now a $500 desktop machine has more storage and runs at ten or even 100 times the speed of the old IBM iron I learned on.
Slowish day, so I took advantage of spare moments to reinstall the SIMH VAXServer emulation with OpenVMS 7.3. The VAXServer emulation runs at reasonable speed once it's set up, but doing the installation of the OS with all the attendant decompressing of packed files does take a while.
This time I have networking set up properly, after discovering that the prepackaged SIMH was compiled without network features. No wonder it just wouldn't configure to use UCX no matter what I tried. Now it works, and talks to both the local network and the internet. This means I can keep a virtual VAX running and open a terminal session on it from another machine. Since my Alpha DS10 at work has been tied up for several months now acting as a "temporary" replacement for a dead proxy server, and with the budget crunch I don't expect a new server to show up any time soon, this is a good thing. Now I have VMS back at work and at home.
Admittedly, I have far more years of IBM mainframe experience than I have with VMS, and I can run IBM's MVS under emulation too. Hercules does a darned good job of that. But VMS networks much more easily, so it integrates with the other environments we use. MVS is from the days when mainframes took up entire buildings and didn't yet deign to speak with mere pipsqueak desktop machines. Now a $500 desktop machine has more storage and runs at ten or even 100 times the speed of the old IBM iron I learned on.
