[Simh] Hobbyist license

[Villy Madsen]

Greetings

not wanting to bother the hardworking volunteers - does anyone have any 
experience with the length of time it takes to get the VAX OPenvms license 
pack....


Further - a History Question...

Anyone remember what the first Version Upgrade  was AFTER the 750 was 
announced....

I was at the Decus in San Diego where it was announced.  I still have the 
mug - although if one didn't know what it was supposed to say, you
probably wouldn't have a clue.....

I also had a mug from the rainbow announcement..  It broke years ago 
(actually the box that I received had a broken mug in it - which they 
cheerfully replaced)
but at tat it outlasted the rainbow...

Having had some experience with another non-standard PC, I had absolutely 
no use for another non-standard machine (with hard sectored buy from dec 
only floppies), and I told them as much...  Much better, more reliable..... 
<G>

I can't remember the name of the other machine, but it had a non standard 
drive in it, soft sectored but with a variable number of sectors - further 
out the more you had...
They were built in Scotts Valley - I fact that I probably only remember 
because I dropped in at Borland and arranged a education license for Turbo 
Pascal - a product that they used at the Community College where I worked 
at that time ('83-'86 or so) for at least 10 years... (Yes I loved that 
product).


Anyone have any experience with the TS11 - It was on the first 750 that we 
took delivery of (the first delivery in Alberta) and it was a jewel... 
 THAT ONE was a jewel.  After a couple of experiences trying to do fresh 
installs on subsequent machines we learned to hate it with a passion.  The 
TU-58 standalone backup had not much in the way of error recovery - I 
remember once having to reload it about a dozen times until it occurred to 
me to see if we had enough of the system across to boot it and run 
VMS/Backup..

Lots of good memories - like the 3 hour job to convert 10,000 lines of 
Fortran so that It would compile dim a(1000);;   a=5 instead of a(1)=5;

Compile and ran a rainfall simulation for San Diego (it was a canned test). 
 I think that it took 20 minutes.  A quick comparison of the outputs and a 
request for a quote resulted in a sale two days later..

We later discovered that the price of the 11/750 and assorted odds and ends 
was recovered after the first 3 months of operation.  They had been paying 
1/3 of their final bill to the local university to run the application 
(overlayed 3 ways from Sunday) on their Amdahl mainframe.....  The clock 
time on the '750 was not much longer than took on the Amdahl - due probably 
to the extensive overlays required to let it run....


The good old days!!

Villy Madsen CISA ISP

(and I was actively support a vax until about 2 years ago... When I shut it 
down last year - permanently, some of the RA81s had pegged their run time 
meters at 30,000 hours.  After wiping everything except the system disk, I 
shut the system down to do the same to the system disk - 2 of the old RA81s 
would NOT spin up.....  I guess there is a limit to anything...  One of the 
drives with 30,000 hours on it had been power cycled only 10 times during 
it's life time.....)




Villy Madsen
www.members.shaw.ca/villy.madsen



Villy Madsen
www.members.shaw.ca/villy.madsen