Subj : Re: what's classic now?
To   : Sean Dennis
From : Dan Cross
Date : Sat Jul 03 2021 08:12 am

On 02 Jul 2021 at 11:08a, Sean Dennis pondered and said...
 
 SD>  JT> I worked with DEC Alphas for a few years, but have only encountered
 SD>  JT> architectures older than that as a hobbyist. SIMH will emulate a VAX,
 SD>  JT> but the problem is in acquiring the OS. HP (which bought Compaq, whic
 SD>  JT> bought DEC) still requires a license to use VMS. Up until fairly
 SD>  JT> recently they had a hobbyist program through which one could get a
 SD>  JT> non-commercial hobbyist license for free, but they discontinued it.
 SD>  JT> I'm not sure what, if anything, took its place.
 SD> 
 SD> I know little about this myself but I have heard of something called
 SD> OpenVMS. Would that be an option?

OpenVMS was the marketing name for VMS after the introduction
of the Alpha.  VAX/VMS 5.x was current when the Alpha was
introduced, and OpenVMS AXP V1.0 is what DEC ported to their
new platform and shipped initially.  Starting with VMS 6.0,
DEC renamed the two versions OpenVMS VAX and OpenVMS AXP,
respectively.

OpenVMS was available under the hobbyist program for quite some
time, but the last VAX release was 7.3.  After Compaq acquired
DEC, they ported VMS to the Itanium platform; this was right
before the HP acquisition.  OpenVMS remained available for both
Alpha and Itanium up through version 8.4.

After HP enterprise announced they were dropping support for
VMS, a new company with former DEC and HP engineers (and I image
a few new folks as well) got started called VSI: they've been
actively working on porting VMS to x86_64 and are continuing the
hobbyist (or something kind of equivalent).  Unfortunately, the
VSI "Community License Program" doesn't cover VAX processors, so
there are no more hobbyist licenses for VAX versions of VMS.

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