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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Apropos of nothing, if you want a VAX/VMS system to play with (they profile one in the book) let me know :-)

This is a great book btw and you can't beat the e-price of free. I also recommend "Operating System Concepts" which is sort of the canonical book on the topic, or if you can find it a used copy of the Springer-Verlag book "Operating Systems Design".

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VAXen to play with? What type of hardware you running on? I vaguely remember VMS and DCL from the late 80's and early 90's, we had terminals everywhere on the floor and in the fab.

I happen to have one each of all but one of every QBUS based VAX DEC made (maybe too, the MicroVax I's location is in question). Also a half dozen VTxx terminals, although the fun ones are the VT340's that do REGiS color graphics. People started sending them to the dump in 1998 because they weren't "Y2K compliant" and DEC wouldn't sign off on non-current hardware ...

I was given a bunch of DG gear around Y2K. Kept a couple of Aviion boards to hang on the office wall after having to purge the system collection before moving.

As much as I love old gear, my interests are currently more modern. Still I'd like to put an OS on a smaller system, either ARM or MIPS. ST has a nice new Discovery kit that as a 2.4" QVGA TFT LCD and would serve has a radio controller prototype.

Aren't those cool? (the STM discovery boards) I got one of the original butterfly boards ($15 from Digikey) and then one of the DISCO boards (the one with the LCD) at ARM TechCon. I then started a Google+ "community" (Cortex M Developers) and started using (and trying to improve in small ways) libopencm3 (see it on Github http://github.com/libopencm3/libopencm3). Lots of folks are using these boards, they are pretty awesome.

The Deathrow cluster offers a demo account and (free) accounts to an OpenVMS V8.4 cluster; on an Alpha and an Itanium. Some of the old VMS games are available online there, as well. http://deathrow.vistech.net

If you want to re-live VMS on your own x86 hardware, the simh emulator (free) includes VAX support. There are various other emulators available. http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/70

For OpenVMS, HP offers (free) OpenVMS hobbyist licenses and disk image downloads for all three OpenVMS architectures; for VAX, Alpha and Itanium. http://www.openvms.org/Hobbyist

Here's a setup of a (slightly older) version of simh on OS X: http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/922

do you mean "Operating System Concepts" by Silberschatz, http://www.amazon.com/dp/1118063333/ and "Introduction to Operating System Design and Implementation" by Kifer and Smolka http://www.springer.com/computer/swe/book/978-1-84628-842-5 ?

Actually I meant this one : http://www.amazon.com/Operating-Systems-Computer-Science-Mad... I mis-remembered it as a Springer book. Instead it was part of the McGraw-Hill Computer Science series.

Silberschatz is the probably the seminal work though.

Thank you for the references.

Wow, this was the textbook for the OS class I took in college in 1981. Brings back memories...

Or sign up at polarhome.com for $10 (sorry to steal your sale)

That is awesome! Unusual name for the site though. I'll point folks at this as a way to get to play with VMS on my "House of VAX" page :-)

Physical or virtual VAX?

Oh I've got a number of actual physical VAXen, (its sort of a Y2K story). Considering setting one the herd up and/or donating it to the Hacker Dojo. The CHM has the "important" vaxes already in the collection, mine are mostly the QBUS vaxen and the desktop ones (VLC, /35, /40, /90, /105, etc)

I would love to see them donated to the Dojo!

I'll see if they will let me set one up there.

I've been thinking about getting some more DEC hardware, right now I have a VT-102 and the CPU card from a PDP-11/23

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