VMS Question...

[Allison]

Ram Meenakshisundaram wrote:

Hi Ram,

> Hi,
> 
> This is my first venture (or an attempt to venture) into the world of VMS.
> I have a couple of questions:
> 
> 1) Is there an emulator, etc to run OpenVMS on and where can I get it as
> well as OpenVMS?

Yes, but I'm not sure of what platform and cost.  I'd never considered 
it.  You'd also need a VMS license and they are not cheap. I have an 
advantage as I was engineering for DEC and took a deal available to 
employees back then.  However that limits me to V5.x versions but thats 
ok even though 7.3 is current.

You can check www.montagar.com to see what the hobbiest license entails.

There is an active newgroup comp.os.vms.

> 2) Does OpenVMS support the notion of shared libraries (DLL to you windoze
> users)...

Yes but very different from winders.  Never did a direct comparison to
winders or unix.  Also all the winders work I do are either at the 
hardware level (boxes and networks) or Databases using delphi, paradox 
and SQL in a server envirnment so I rarely look at the lower levels of 
winders unless forced to. Though I've done stuff at the other extreme on 
PCs in the DOS and QBasic4.5 as programmed controllers.

> I want to re-port an old application, but want to use OpenVMS instead.  I
> don't have a machine that is capable of running VMS (nor do I have the space
> for one), so an emulator will suffice....

If you can find a uVAX3100 (microvax3100, Vaxserver3100) that would do 
and they are small 18x4x16 and 180W power. Disks for those are 3.5" 
SCSI-1 or II typically. VMS on a 3100 only needs 100mb for itself so a 
1gb drive is plenty of room.  VAX systems of the microVAX flavor are 
fairly small though some of the bigger members can be a bit large.  The 
smallest would be the uVAX2000 at about a 1/2 cuFT most of the 3100 
series are desktop sized and the 6000 series are generally rack sized 
bigger systems.  Stay away from the Qbus vaxen (MicrovaxII, 3500) as 
that will definately get you into the hardware realm though they are 
good machines. Also Qbus machines are more likely to have older disk 
interfaces (MFM drives) or other DEC unique disk.  The Qbus machines
are also likely to be missing key items like network card or enough 
memory.  As to memory, anything with at least 16mb of ram will be OK
although more is better.  You need at least 12mb to run VMS decently
starting with V5.x and 16mb with V7.x.

My collection of VAXen include a pair of microVAXIIs and 3 MicroVAX200
and 8 3100s (mix of /m10s and /M76s).

Allison