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Postings from November 2007
Nicholas Clark wrote: > On Sat, Nov 24, 2007 at 12:32:45PM -0600, Craig A. Berry wrote: > >> late as v6.2, introduced in 1995. So there's no reason in principle >> that we couldn't build a very recent version of Perl, possibly even >> 5.10, on a 30-year-old board system (you heard me right, the 11/780 >> did not have a microprocessor). We'd have to find somebody still >> running one that had adequate memory and disk space and was willing to >> donate (I'd guess) a month or two of processing time. Or you could > > Surely we could cheat by building it on the emulator, and then running make > test (or some subset) on the real machine? It is hard to find a machine that old in working condition and available. I have seen reports of 11/785s that are still in use as of last year though. >> prove it's possible using the 11/780 emulator in SIMH >> (http://simh.trailing-edge.com). It would be completely useless as >> well as completely cool, but it would drive home your point that > > How much faster is the emulator than the real hardware? I couldn't easily > find the answer to that on the site. A VAX/11/780 is rated at about 1 VUP or possibly 1 million instructions per second. From memory when I looked it up, with commonly available current PC hardware, SIMH can run at about 12 VUPs. With the typical cheap ones it appears that I could get 6 VUPs. My VAX-4000 Model 500 that is currently powered off is rated at 24 VUPs. I have seen smoke tests on the vmsperl mailing list of faster machines. The last time I tried to build blead on a VAX in debug, the resulting files including listings took up an entire RF72 disk. Since then we have changed the VMS debug build to less quantity of information, and actually more useful data. It looks like it will be sometime this summer before I can get any of my VAX systems back on line, either real ones or in emulation. I am looking at rehosting my VAX system on an emulator to reduce the amount of hardware that I have, but currently I would take a big performance hit. The commercial Charon-VAX apparently has a faster emulator. They also have a Charon-Alpha. I have not looked too much into their product lines, other than they have had and removed hobby options in the past, and they also had a Personal Alpha version that was barely adequate to run VMS for sale at a low price. But yes, currently licenses for OpenVMS are for sale on 3 hardware platforms, and running on emulation on the x86 family of hardware. For hobby use, the SIMH platform can probably be built on 64 bit VMS systems, or any UNIX like system supporting 64 bit integers. -John wb8tyw@qsl.net Personal Opinion OnlyThread Previous | Thread Next