10 ms·
A Raspberry Pi VAX Cluster (2012)
- rutthenut 7y agoAha, I mentioned this yesterday in the 'oldies' thread. Be interesting to see if others have anything to say on it, or if the idea of a VAX Cluster has passed most people by.
- rollthehard6 7y agoAfter my initial computing forays with BigTrak, a ZX Spectrum and some time on a BBC Micro and Apple Mac, my first multi user computer use was on the VAX Cluster at uni. I hated UNIX when I tried that on a Sun workstation as it seemed so much less friendly than VMS with it's hierarchical HELP command. Ironically I went onto to a 25 years and counting *NIX/Linux based infra career :)
- hestefisk 7y agoThis is really cool. Since reading about Masters of Deception, Legion of Doom And other legendary hacker groups with a thirst for VAXen in the late 80es, I have always wanted a VAX machine to hack on.
- segmondy 7y agoI don't think they were priced because they were a delight to use or hack but rather because they were nice targets due to the companies using it and what might be found on them.
- floren 7y agoNeat writeup. I was always a fan of VMS; my university still had a VMS cluster that was used every quarter for class registration and completely ignored the rest of the year, but if you poked around you could still find relics of the old days, like ancient discussion forums software still containing posts from the 90s. If I can put on my enormous pedant hat for a moment though, a VAX is a minicomputer, not a mainframe.
- the_seraphim 7y agoThat must be quite the pedant hat to be arguing that point especially considering a mainframe and a minicomputer and the decision to label a machine one or the other is almost purely a marketing decision, i would enjoy your justification
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoA MicroVAX was certainly a mini. But the range extended up to the VAX 9000 which was a >$1,000,000 mainframe.
- walshemj 7y agoVAX and their competitors where supermini's
- slavapestov 7y agoWell, to be extra pedantic, the latter MicroVAXen used the same enclosure as the "desktop" VAXstations, except without the graphics and peripherals -- just serial ports for a VT terminal!
- virusduck 7y agoWe had that too in the early aughts--used a program called OASIS (may have been a custom application...not sure). Some older profs still used the VMS sys for email (I think it had PINE for VMS installed for easy use).
- bra-ket 7y agoYou might be interested in this job at Lockheed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20209869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20209869
- cowmix 7y agoOk.. The problem I've haven been trying to obtain a copy of VMS to try out this very setup. I have tons of old VMS programs I created in college back in '89 I would love to execute again.. In theory you can get a hobbyist free copy of VMS via this site, but no one has responded to me from it. The instructions on how to get the license and binaries are not very clear: http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/news.php http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/news.php
- icedchai 7y agoYou can find links to VMS installation images with a Google search, for both VAX and Alpha. You can also find links to a license key generator if you search for "VMS Liberation Front" This gives you keys for VMS and all layered products. I am only advocating this until you get a "legit" Hobbyist license, of course.
- ch_123 7y agoTry this: https://www.hpe.com/h41268/live/index_e.aspx?qid=24548 https://www.hpe.com/h41268/live/index_e.aspx?qid=24548 Make sure to fill out all the fields, even the ones which are not marked as mandatory - apparently if the form is not fully filled out, it gets ignored.
- inetsee 7y agoThe page for getting a hobbyist license is really unclear. I finally found 2 links on the page which mentioned the hobbyist license. One link brings up a warning, and if I say go ahead anyway, I get a file not found message. The other link does bring up a signup page, but one of the things it asks for is the name of a "participating chapter" and a "membership number". Can anybody explain what this is? Do I have to sign up for a membership in some obscure organization to get a license?
- inetsee 7y agoDid some searching (should have done it before I posted). The "obscure organization" is actually an HP Enterprise User Community, and you can get a free membership by signing up here: http://www.connect-community.org/ http://www.connect-community.org/
- epynonymous 7y agolmfao, absolutely gosu! +1 openvms i remember the good old days of setting up vms clusters and good old dcl. we had easily 96 node clusters, alphas and vax hw, if my memory serves me correctly.
- Zenst 7y agoGiven the emulation is for a 64MB VAX, would it not be viable to run several VAX emulators upon a single Rpi and play with clustering that way and removing the limit of needing two Rpi's with idle resources. Had a quick search and whilst no clear cut examples jumped out, it seems that some emulations require multiple instances of SimH running (HP!), so would appear viable, just some hacking (original definition, not the tabloid definition).
- ch_123 7y agoNewer version of SIMH let you allocate up to 512MB to the VAX instances.
- ChuckMcM 7y agoBack when the Y2K thing was a thing all of these little VAXStation VLC's were being dumped on the market left and right. I had 15 of them at one time with an average acquisition price per unit of less than that of a Raspberry pi :-). Even built a 4 unit cluster for fun with a NetGear 4 port switch. Easier to get RasPi's of course, and even easier to run multiple containers running simh to get the same experience. I can recommend playing around with a VAXCluster for while to get a feel for what a nice clustered computer command line felt like back in the 90's. There are still lessons to be learned for current developers of "cloud" systems.
- pstuart 7y ago> There are still lessons to be learned for current developers of "cloud" systems. Any notes of your own or links on such? I'm old school myself (e.g., my first computer was a Northstar Advantage), but I never had the pleasure of working on a VAX.
- ChuckMcM 7y agoI kept some notes on my "House of VAX"[1] but really DEC's documentation was a wonder to behold, binder after orange binder on everything. A lot of that is online (scanned) on the bitsavers.org web site. [1] http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/computers/vaxen/ http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/computers/vaxen/
- pstuart 7y agoLots of cool stuff, but I'm curious for your elevator pitch of "VMS could do <awesomeness> but nobody does this today, if they did, they'd make cloud computing even more powerful". Lessons for the lazy, as it were :-)
- mustntmumble 7y agoI find that odd that the VAXStation VLC's were being dumped because of Y2K. VMS has a 64-bit datetime data structure. The C run-time library still had the Year2038 time problem though...
- bangelo 7y agowhat is an anti-vaxxer to do?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jdblair 7y agoDon't tell Dave Cutler you're running OpenVMS on top of a *nix!
- ch_123 7y agoFrom Wikipedia: > [Cutler] expressed his low opinion of the Unix process input/output model by reciting "Get a byte, get a byte, get a byte byte byte" to the tune of the finale of Rossini's William Tell Overture.
- vaxman 7y agoHe is the turncoat that brought down the empire. He was full on correct about Unix though, except that we're not fighting over sub-MIPS resources anymore so the "waste" created by that architecture doesn't affect the bottom line as much (unless you're Google hah -donworrydeyreworkinonit).
- musicale 7y agoSimH is a beautiful thing. I use it to run Multics (and explore the features that Unix left out.) Should also be possible to run SimH in a web browser to make a living computer history museum on the web.
- michrassena 7y agoThanks for this. When the Multics source was released a few years ago, I really wanted to play around with that environment. It's nice to know there's something a mere mortal can install and use.