Re: OpenVMS Hobby Program

From: Alan Frisbie (Usenet02_REMOVE_at_Flying-Disk.com)
Date: 06/27/05 

Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 11:15:03 -0700

susan_skonetski@hotmail.com wrote:

> Do you find the VMS Hobbyist Program valuable?

Indeed! I love VMS so much that sometimes it is difficult
to tell where "work" ends and "hobby" begins, however.
Perhaps that should be called "obsession". :-)

> How do you use your Hobbyist license?

For use on machines I have rescued from dumpsters and
surplus sales. Some I keep around to run old peripherals,
some I refurbish and give to deserving students (in the
broadest sense of the word). Running VMS on my laptop (using
SIMH) on an airplane is a great conversation starter. It gives
me the opening I need to give a complete stranger a VMS sales
pitch. :-)

I need to learn more about clusters, so I will be using a
couple of my smaller machines (see below) for that.

> Since the license needs to be renewed each year, how do you do that?

Via the Montagar web site. Some of my machines may get used
only occasionally, so I often find that I need to get new
licenses. :-)

> Do you get the CD's?

I buy a couple of the VAX CDs from Montagar each year to go
with the systems I give away. I occasionally buy VAX CONDIST
kits on ebay. For Alpha kits, I have my own base kit, but
borrow a friend or client's layered product kit.

> Give me one improvement you would make

Make it possible for people with a hobbyist license to download
kits. By this, I mean removing any legal uncertainties.
You might want to restrict the downloads to those with valid
hobbyist licenses, but that is just a detail.

> What type of machine do you use?

At the moment:
SIMH, MicroVAX II, two VAX 3300, VAX 3400, two VAX 4000-200,
two MicroVAX 4000/VLC, three MicroVAX 3100/76, AlphaStation
200 4/166, AlphaStation 600 5/266, two AlphaStation 500, and
an AlphaBook(!). Needless to say, few of these are turned on
at any time and many are sitting on shelves in a storage unit,
just waiting to be needed. Some are simply waiting for a good
home.

> The hobbyist program is currently available on VAX, Alpha and Integrity
> how do you think folks will use the hobby license on Integrity?

It's too early to tell, but I suspect that the early users will
be people whose employer is getting Itaniums, and want to keep
on top of the technology.

Alan

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Multinet on VMS 5.5 please HELP !
    ... > I obtained the hobbyist license and also a license for multinet. ... > Now I want to install multinet on my emulated vax with vms 5.5. ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: VAX 4000/500 general questions
    ... SHOW LICENSE ... and talk to VMS. ... You wrote that you connected the VAX directly to the PC. ... will tell you how many disks are present in the system. ...
    (comp.sys.dec)
  • VMS Advertising was: Re: Renaissance of VAX-VMS ?
    ... Barry Treahy, Jr. ... What I'm saying is that HP France today has no ... > that HP is working on the second VMS port since VAX, ... > development of VMS for Charon to be successful? ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: Mosaic v3.9 compile
    ... and Motif, and which will run on VMS 5.4-3 onward, Motif 1.1 onward, ... or OLBs to link VAX executables against, or how to provide VAX OLBs ... which will link in any of the three possible C environments. ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: Re: [9fans] bootalpha and the no valid stack error
    ... me that the whizzo VMS queue instructions are actually worth having. ... multiple console monitors do seem a little pointless. ... porting VMS from the VAX and DigitalUNIX (or whatever it was called ... DEC was the only company that bought into the koolaid of a unified Unix ...
    (comp.os.plan9)
Quantcast