[HECnet] Apparently good news from VSI

[mark at wickensonline.co.uk]

Mark

I  had a really nice ZX6000 and it did indeed make a lovely room heater! It was fun to play with HP/UX for a while too.

Part of me also laments giving up most of my collection, but at the same time I have virtualized all my important systems and still have lots of fun when I'm not doing radio, and the primary reason for downsizing in anticipation of a house move hasn't happened but I am still hopeful!

There always appears to be a sweet spot when it comes to purchasing commercial systems that are being disposed off. I distinctly remember working for the DWP at St Annes and a pair of VAX 4000/705As were on eBay and went for 150 quid, just off of support contract.

Such is life!

Mark.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE <owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE> On Behalf Of Mark Benson
Sent: 22 April 2020 19:10
To: <hecnet at update.uu.se> <hecnet at Update.UU.SE>
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Apparently good news from VSI


Wow, I *may* have jumped too soon in deciding to let my DEC gear go! Realistically, and sadly, though, it isn’t likely to get used even with a new programme in place. I’m glad there’s something planned out for continuity, though. It means I can hopefully still putz with VMS in SimH if I need to revisit it. 

>> I might actually go out and buy a cheap alpha or itanic at some point now….. if such things exist.

Alphas are getting a smidge rare, seem to be more parts around these days than whole units.

Itanium systems you are limited to supported HP Integrity units. There don’t seem to be a lot of those around at an acceptable price point in this neck of the woods either, they are currently in that horrible ’someone in Enterprise might give us a huge pile of notes for this if they are desperate’ price band.

> I can see an Alpha, but why would you want a wacko architecture created by Intel?  It's not as if they have any track record of designing nice CPU architectures.

Itanium wasn’t Intel’s idea, it was HP’s s far as I know, it originated as the EPIC architecture. They turned to Intel to assist in developing it because the climate at the time made developing it in-house untenable (it was around the time when. Explains why HP clung to it for so long! As a side-note, you’ll notice Intel actually bailed on using it in anything but HPC and specialist applications in 2004 be implementing EM64t (amd64) on P4s and Xeons instead (mostly leant on by Microsoft, no doubt).

As far as VMS goes, aside from it’s slightly fierce power consumption, a zx6000 with a Radeon 7000 PCI video card does run VMS really well indeed. Until VMS hits x86_64, Itanium is essentially the pinnacle of OpenVMS hardware in terms of performance. Makes for a good room heater too.

— 

Mark Benson