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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.
Up until about the year 2000, I ran a small hardware shop for customers. Gradually, it became clear to me that the value of computers isn't in the hardware, it's in the software and data that they hold.
In response, I reinvented myself and co-developed a company that hosts data for (now) hundreds of clients and tens of thousands of users. Comparing the total hardware value of all our servers to our annual revenue puts hardware expenses (roughly) in petty cash. Servers host a *lot* of data, it's the data and the software used to manage the data that's valuable.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
There's lots of useful free stuff for people who want to emulate ancient computers at pdp11.org.
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.)