My Retrochallenge January 2015 Entry
So I have been tinkering today with the simulated VMS set up on the server and also started making a stab at bringing up a VAX 11/780 simulator configured to run BSD Unix. The DL380 has a backup battery attached to the internal HP Smart Array P400 controller. In this server there were two intelligent …
So I finally braved the Kim Uno and typed in Lunar Lander – thanks Dale for encouraging me to do this – weird how you get so lazy with such good technology surrounding you these day. Sometimes it’s as much about the journey as the end goal. I played a couple of games and of …
Firstly, apologies for not taking more of an active part in the competition as an organiser. I know I’ve done half-time round ups and such in the past, but I’ve been in the unique position this month to have the time to be able to indulge myself in my own retro-tinkering, so I expect leniency …
So, so, so. Got a little distracted. To say the least. Watched Elysium tonight which was very enjoyable. Some serious compute cycles went in to that film. Last night I was attempting, still, to get DCPS to work. Someone has now kindly provided me with Version 2.7 and it’s still not working. Might need to …
Just a quick update before I hit the sack. I’ve been busy this evening on a number of Retrocomputing activities: Fibre Broadband Arrived! This morning a very nice engineer enabled and installed fibre broadband. A quick test revealed a download speed of around 80 Mbit/sec and an upload speed of around 20 Mbit/sec. Cushty. Unfortunately …
First task in the reconfiguration effort is to reassign drive letters to the SIMH VAX 3900 simulator drive mappings. According to best practice drives should be mounted in the SYLOGICALS.COM configuration file. The hardware-based BUBBLE configuration is as follows:
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$ msc == "MOUNT/SYSTEM/CLUSTER" $!MSC DSA0: /SHADOW=($255$DKA0:,$255$DKA500:) BUBBLESYSTEM SYSTEM$ $ MSC DSA1: /SHADOW=($255$DKA100:) BUBBLEDATA01 DATA01$ $ MSC DSA2: /SHADOW=($255$DKA200:) BUBBLEDATA02 DATA02$ $! $ MSC $255$DKA300 BUBBLEBACKUP BACKUPS$ $ MSC $255$DKA400: BUBBLEKITS KITS$ $ MSC $255$DKA500: BUBBLEPAGING PAGING$ |
Note that DSA0: is commented out – this is documentation. The shadowing of the system …
Yesterday and today the plan has been to ressurect BUBBLE. This is a configuration that my was first foray into production configured VAX/VMS. Thanks to the stellar efforts of Steve Davidson (a fellow hecnet‘er) this machine went from an initially very poorly configured amateur hour effort of mine to a mutiuser and clustered setup with …
So, this evening, we went from this: to this: and this: The build went swimmingly! I even managed not to reverse the polarity of the power – a Wickens speciality. It really is a wonderous little thing. The glow of seven segment displays only bettered by two things: vacuum fluorescent displays and green screen cathode …
Some good success tonight – the VAX MP (MultiProcessor) emulator is now up and running on the DL380 G5 following the fix graciously provided by the developer Sergey Oboguev. I called it VULCAN – the RX2660 Itanium based server is TSR2 – VULCAN seemed like a fitting companion. The SYS$STARTUP:SYSTARTUP_VMS.COM file now directly loads the VSMP$LOAD …
Continue reading ‘VAX MP up and running and connected to HECnet’ »
Today I have been installing VAX MP on the new toy, a rather noisy HP DL380 G5. I’d found an issue identifying non hyperthreaded processors that has been very graciously fixed, but as the server is currently sat on the dining room table I dare not start it up again in the middle of the …
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