Vax, PDP/11, HP3000 and Others Live On In the Cloud

judgecorp writes: Surprisingly, critical applications still rely on old platforms, although legacy hardware is on its last legs. Swiss emulation expert Stromasys is offering emulation in the cloud for old hardware using a tool cheekily named after Charon, the ferryman to the afterlife. Systems covered include the Vax and PDP/11 platforms from Digital Equipment (which was swallowed by Compaq and then HP) as well as Digital's Alpha RISC systems, and HP's HP3000. It also offers Sparc emulation, although Oracle might dispute the need for this.

Comments

XMESS, MESS and MAME - where to get roms!

[Grindalf]

The world needs more good emulators, such as XMESS and MAME. But where do you get the ROMs from? Check out the internet archive with a good broadband connection! Try the following links: https://archive.org/details/ME... and https://archive.org/details/MA... for some ROMs. There are probably more, if you look at the "software" section and if you also try the "search" ...

Free Emulators for PDP-11 and VAX

[maynard]

There's lots of useful free stuff for people who want to emulate ancient computers at pdp11.org.

Re:It's VAX, not Vax

[Anonymous Coward]

No, VAX is the name of the CPU ISA. VMS is the name of the operating system that was the primary focus of that platform, although you could also get various Unix-class operating systems to run on VAX systems as well (NetBSD and OpenBSD are the main ones today.)

Re:It's VAX, not Vax

[Anonymous Coward]

Incorrect.

BSD Unix was born on the PDP-11; the VAX-based Unix OSes started being available in June 1979, whilst the first VAX (VAX-11/780) was released in October 1977, with VMS as the OS. VMUNIX (the Unix OS kernel that supported the VAX's virtual memory capabilities) came out at the end of 1979.

Re:It's VAX, not Vax

[NotSanguine]

Apologies. I messed up the link:
v7 Unix.

Incorrect.

BSD Unix was born on the PDP-11; the VAX-based Unix OSes started being available in June 1979, whilst the first VAX (VAX-11/780) was released in October 1977, with VMS as the OS. VMUNIX (the Unix OS kernel that supported the VAX's virtual memory capabilities) came out at the end of 1979.

That is correct. It was based on Bell Labs v7 Unix, which DEC ported to PDP-11 and VAX, and renamed V7M. Ultrix was the follow on to V7M and was first released five years later, in 1984.

Ken Olsen expounded on the DEC's relationship with loved UNIX:

One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX? Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines. And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s. It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming. With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there. [emphasis added] -- Ken Olsen, President of DEC, 1984