Re: desupport - end of an era

I started as a true MACRO-20 Assembler Systems Programmer on a DECSystems20-60 myself as well. A good friend of mine actually has a KL10 running today in a virtual machine on his Mac. For those who must have a COMND jsys fix, he did "something along the following lines:

• I built an Ubuntu Linux VM (Ubuntu is free and fairly easy to set up, so it was a natural choice -- CentOS might be another good choice, as it is essentially "RedHat for free".
• Once you have the VM set up (and know how to become superuser): . open a terminal window. . become superuser. . obtain a copy of the Panda distribution containing the KLH20 emulated DEC-20 with TOPS20 V7 included.
• You'll basically be unpacking the Panda distribution, which creates a "panda-dist" subdirectory, then you'll enter that subdir, make a couple of INI file edits, then lauch:

   ./klt20

• Then there are a series of boot commands that follow, after which, TOPS20 is up and running. All of the rest is in the README (which is a plain ASCII text file)."

/jsi (they plural of "jsys" :)

On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 10:13 AM, Rich Jesse < rjoralist2_at_society.servebeer.com> wrote:

> Dick writes:
>
> > Why? I started out on VMS MANY years ago, VAX/VMS. When DEC
>
> I started on a DECSystem 20 running TOPS-20. When the VAX 4000 series (I'm
> ashamed I forgot which!) came in, I hated it. Whatdya mean I can't just
> hit
> TAB for command completion? DCL? Ewww! It's so complex! Of course I
> learned to love it (via the Orange Wall) and see why VMS was superior in
> many many ways.
>
> Then came Alpha. The CPU came out of the gate at 150Mhz which was blazing
> in the day. A rough ride on the conversion, but that shear speed was worth
> it.
>
> Only problem was that big companies were writing for Unixes first, then
> trying to port to VMS. One main difference between the two OSs is that
> process creation is relatively quite expensive compared to Unix, but the
> ports never quite got that. It made them slow in comparison and it seems
> that the wonderful OS took quite a beating for that.
>
> DCL and the OS overall was (is?) very elegant compared to any Unix shell
> scripting. There's true error handling. There's no need to haphazardly
> parse program output that can change depending on when it's run (e.g.
> idiotic date formats from ls) since there was an actual API.
> Bullet-proofing scripts was really quite easy in comparison.
>
> > I remember one Oracle or IOUG article which stated that "DBA's
> > should be the agents of change". Well here you are, your now an agent
> > of change.
>
> Yup. While I really miss the power and elegance of DCL, I'll never have to
> deal with running out of NPAGEDYN ever again.
>
> > BTW: We have A VMS server here, no support folks in
> > operations, and I can't wait till it hits the dumpster. (Kept me up all
> > night Tuesday when it decided to fry a couple of CPU's.)
>
> The OS didn't cause that CPU to fry...just sayin'. :)
>
> I finally recycled my Alphastation 500, Sun Ultra 5, and Sun Ultra 10 just
> a
> few months ago. I'm sure the "geek" at the big box store didn't know what
> they were.
>
> Rich
>
> Disclaimer: Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a
> new heel for m'shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they
> called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was
> the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those
> days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Gimme five bees for a
> quarter, you'd say. Now where was I? Oh yeah. The important thing was
> that
> I had an onion tied to my belt, which was the style at the time. You
> couldn't get white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could
> get
> was those big yellow ones...
>
> --
> http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
>
>
>

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