[HECnet] Connected to MIM on my VT420

[Cory Smelosky]

On 30 Mar 2013, at 01:23, "Mark Benson" <md.benson at gmail.com> wrote:



On 29 Mar 2013, at 23:29, Cory Smelosky wrote:


Not extremely interesting   all of you have probably seen this a million times before on your own gear. ;)

But!   I brought up a SIMH instance on my Raspberry PI, connected the console to my USB to serial adapter, and used it to connect to MIM using my VT420. ;)   I'll eventually use a DECserver   but for now this is what I have. ;)

http://gewt.net/pics/vt420-mim.jpg (apologies about the picture quality   can't quite keep my damn hands perfectly steady)

(also, my connection to MIM keeps dropping   I need to figure out what the cause is)

To me that's the pinnacle of emulation. Connecting REAL peripherals to an emulator to get close to the REAL experience. I did a bit of testing of Mark Pizz's serial port code for terminals against my VT510 just because I wanted to be able to do real, direct serial terminal work against an emulated VAX or PDP-11 and so I made sure it was tested some so it got into 4.0. There's something rewarding about rattling away on a VT510 talking to a tiny board that draws a lot less power than the VT. :)

It is indeed rewarding. :)


The RaspberryPi is great for lower-end VAX and PDP-11 emulation. It only musters about 1-2VUPs at best running the uVAX 3900 so isn't a huge deal faster than the early 11/7xx series machines. Still my Area router is a rev. 1 Raspberry Pi running raspbian and SimH. It's been running 24/7 for almost a year :)

It most definitely is.   I chose VMS 5.2 for a reason. ;)


mark at raspi1:~$ uptime
03:46:15 up 54 days,   5:29,   1 user,   load average: 0.23, 0.17, 0.14

We get occasional power outages (hence the short uptime) and I never got around to buying a UPS (if my computer stack goes off I just grab a torch and read a book and wait for the power to come back :P).

How long are the outages usually?   (I have some UPSes and some generators.   Basement floods if power is out too long)


I have 2 more RasPi's in the 5.25" bays of a 2U unit now too, one that will be running as a PDP-11/93 and one that will run as a VAX 11/780. They share the 2U with a Atom D410MO motherboard that will run my VAX work machine (it's about 20x faster than a RasPi). The thing is jury-rigged so the Pis run of the 5V line on the ATX PSU via a Molex. It has a GBit hub inside and 2 NICs on the Atom board (alas only 10/100) that are bridged so it only needs 1 ethernet port to attach the whole box. It's neat and save for some soldering, I built it myself. I originally built it for hosting a VAXcluster but I really have no use for one.

That is an awesome setup.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixel_mason/sets/72157630752112422/

Oh, incidentally, Gregg, the Optiplex is probably round that way so it keeps him warm at his desk.

If that were a desk, that would be true. ;)


I have an ancient (well 2004-ish) P4 3.0 HT that I use for Windows XP 32-bit now I'm on Win 7 64-bit (I have legacy hardware devices that don't have any 64-bit drivers). It's a Dell Dimension 4600 motherboard that's been reboxed with a new case and PSU with a cute ducted cooling fan for the P4 made of plasti-card, duct tape tape and a 120mm fan. Which reminds me, I must put Pathworks32 on it this week :)

Personally, i'd run NT 4 on a P4 (shame it doesn't seem to like HT P4s   ).   I prefer it to XP. ;)


-- 

Mark Benson

http://DECtec.info
Twitter: @DECtecInfo
HECnet: STAR69::MARK

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