[rescue] OpenVMS is officially End-of-Life

[Ian King]

On 6/10/13 3:50 PM, "Andrew Hoerter" <amh at POBOX.COM> wrote:

>On 6/10/13, Lionel Peterson <lionel4287 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> So sad:
>>
>> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/10/openvms_death_notice/
>>
>> Of course, this means I now have a great desire to run it on
>>something...
>> Are proper OS bits available for hobbyist use available? Any idea what
>> suitable hardware is available reasonably-priced?
>
>Hobbyist licenses were still available at least as of late last year,
>when I renewed mine.  After you register you can request a link to
>download CD images for your architecture of choice (these requests are
>manually responded to -- but usually quickly).
>
>Hobbyist registration:
>
><http://www.openvms.org/pages.php?page=Hobbyist>
>
>You will need a user group membership ID, joining DECUServe is free of
>charge and qualifies you.
>
>Alpha hardware is overpriced on the used market, in my experience.
>VAX doesn't run anything past VMS 7.3 or so, IIRC.  You might look
>into an older Itanium system (rx1600 or rx2600), those seem to be
>reasonably cheap.

And I'd say, what's wrong with 7.3?  I've been running it on both VAXen
and Alphas for some time, with the hobbyist license. At the Living
Computer Museum, we're running 6.2 on a VAX-11/780-5, which runs 24x7.
>From what I understand of 8.x (I haven't personally used it), it's
additional features are about big datacenter use, which you can't do with
a hobbyist license anyway.  If you just want to celebrate the beauty that
is VMS, get thee a 7.3 CD, a hobbyist license and either a physical or
emulated platform, and rock on!  Smaller, slower VAXstations are pretty
cheap; just make sure you have at least 24MB of working store if you want
to run TCP/IP.  -- Ian