Ole Houen, 123RF
VAX emulation with OpenVMS
Time Machine
Yesterday's computers – and not just old home computers and game consoles – still hold a great deal of charm for many people today. This is especially true of computers that, at the time, were prohibitively expensive, even for many businesses. Now you can experience some of these historical computers with the help of SIMH [1], which emulates a number of antiquities, including the VAX and PDP series of DEC computers, the MITS Altair, and computers by Hewlett Packard and Honeywell. Many of these dinosaurs were milestones in the development of information technology and marked the rise of entire companies.
One example is the series of VAX machines by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), which wrote the history book with its PDP series of computers. The VAX was groundbreaking in that it introduced a 32-bit architecture with virtual memory; it soon became the market leader in the business computer segment.
For their new computer, DEC released a new operating system called VMS; it implemented support for user terminals and advanced features such as clustering. VMS was also known for its sophisticated security concepts, including Access Control Lists (ACLs), and auditing capabilities. The VMS operating system still runs on many bank computers.
Resurrection
The SIMH emulator was written by DEC veteran Bob Supnik, who now works at Unisys. He was inspired by his colleague Larry Stewart, who pointed out that computer history was doomed to extinction if somebody didn't do something about it. This somebody was Supnik, who took the suggestion as an opportunity to move from assembler to the C programming language and begin the SIMH project.
SIMH is available in the repositories of some Linux distributions, but with some files missing. Installing from source, however, is easy. After you have downloaded the approximately 3MB ZIP file,
...
Buy ADMIN Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Related content
-
Setting up an OpenNebula Cloud
The OpenNebula cloud middleware system is one of the easiest private clouds in the sky. We'll show you how to get started.
- Caché Database Now Offers High Availibility
-
Virtualization with KVM
KVM continues to gain popularity in the world of Linux – so much so, that it has become Red Hat and Ubuntu's preferred virtualization solution. In contrast to Xen, setting up KVM involves just a couple of steps, and the guest operating systems can run without special patches.
-
FreeBSD Version 10 released
The Unix-like FreeBSD is viewed as highly reliable and forms the underpinnings of both Mac OS X and the Sony PlayStation 4. Version 10 introduces new features and performance gains. -
Booting Windows from a compressed image
Microsoft's WIMBoot lets you run Windows 8.1 from a compressed file on solid state drives.