[Simh] HPE has started emailing the final hobbyist licenses

[Robert G. Schaffrath]

V5.5-2 is the environment I have. When I joined the hobbyist program in 
2004, I bought the VMS V7.2 CD but I also had an old 4mm DAT tape with a 
final image backup of a MicroVAX 3900 running V5.5-2 prior to its being 
decommissioned at the end of 1996 and the hardware scrapped. I was 
eventually able to extract the image from the 4mm with a combination of 
4mm drive on Windows NT and the VMS V7.2 system to build disks. When I 
booted the V5.5-2 image under the MicroVAX SiMH simulator, it came right 
up without any problems as it believed, and the installed PAK's 
believed, it was running on a real MicroVAX 3900.

These days I boot it perhaps once every 3 or 4 months just to reminisce. 
I get a kick out of looking at some of the kernel mode Macro-32 I had 
written way back in the early 1990's. One of executables gives me a 
control-T type status display when I press control-P and the other 
causes the time to be continuously displayed in the lower right side of 
the status bar of a VT4xx terminal, updating every second (it actually 
works with Tera Term 4.x in VT420 mode). They run Kernel or Exec mode 
because they load themselves into P1 space and run basically as the DOS 
equivalent of TSR's. Looking at that old code I find it hard to believe 
I wrote it. There is also a lot of VAX BASIC stuff I wrote with SMG$. 
Hard to believe so much of this is 28 to 30 years old.

As for 7.2, I have not booted the V7.2 image since the hobbyist PAK's 
expired years ago and I never kept them up.

On 3/13/2020 9:40 AM, simh-request at trailing-edge.com wrote:
>   Re:  HPE has started emailing the final hobbyist licenses

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