Friday evening I came home to discover that the 2GB SD card I had ordered almost 2 weeks ago had finally arrived (postal strikes).
Last night I got round to copying on to it an ISO of the OpenVMS VAX v7.3 install CD, and managed to boot this on the Nokia N800 via SimH running in an xterm. And tonight I grabbed a few screen shots for posterity – could this be the smallest VAX ever? Whilst VMS booted it was only the cut down version on the install CD that is used to install a fully featured VMS system to a target disk drive. It is none the less VMS but the journey doesn’t stop here.
Next up on this ‘NanoVAX’ adventure will be building a hard disk image with VMS tailored such that it writes to disk as infrequently as possible. And I have a few ideas of where to start thanks to suggestions from folks on the Classic Computing mailing list, and the advice of a chap who sent me e-mail following my post on building SimH for Maemo.
I am mightily impressed by this achievement.
Link | October 16th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
I’d like to hear details about adapter sharing. Simh is little beast, just made for such kind of emulation. Also, could you point me to link for 7.3 image?
I suppose openvms sees no difference weather is it hand size node or closet one.
Zoran
Link | June 7th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Hello,
your VAX environment is really impressive , compared to a good old VAX 780.
How did you managed to get a OpenVMS VAX 7.3 distribution of OpenVMS ?
Pierre
Link | June 16th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Hi Zoran & Pierre,
I haven’t tried out network adapter sharing yet. Not sure if SimH plays well with wireless adapters. If not maybe there is some trick that can be done with Linux tun/tap devices and tunneling traffic.
You can get the media via the OpenVMS Hobbyist Program (http://www.montagar.com/hobbyist/mount.html), from eBay or a friend who subscribes to regular updates from HP. It is not available for download as far as I know, which is a shame since licensing is free via the Hobbyist Program.
Andrew
Link | June 23rd, 2008 at 7:46 pm