

A Raspberry Pi (VAX) Cluster - mikecane
http://www.designspark.com/content/raspberry-pi-vax-cluster

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sciurus
OT, but I'm getting desperate to find a home for the VAX described below
before my dad scraps it. He purchased it several years ago from a man in north
Georgia who said it spend the 1990s answering the phone at a utility company.
My dad kept it in his classroom while he was a high school technology teacher,
but now that he's no longer teaching it's gathering dust on his carport.

There's a Vaxstation 3, DECvoice unit, two hard drives, and a tape drive in an
enclosure on wheels. There's also a VT420 terminal. Pictures are at
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/puerexmachina/sets/721576229810...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/puerexmachina/sets/72157622981044137/)

If anyone is interested, or could put me in touch with VAX collectors, please
email me. My contact info is in my profile.

~~~
cheatercheater
Reblogging to a place that might help find a good home for your VAX.

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gouranga
Ahh the memories.

At my first proper job, we had a 8 node VAXCluster running Oracle 7, VB3
clients on Windows 3.1 on Compaq and DEC machines, Motif clients on Solaris
2.4 on SparcStations :)

The VAXCluster had 100% uptime for 4 years when they killed it and replaced it
with Alpha machines.

~~~
excuse-me
I remember DEC sending out a fix for the "day 10000 bug".

Some system counter would wrap around if it was up for 10000days (27years)!
Compare it with the Windows95 49day bug that nobody ever reached.

~~~
Hoff
Some DEC code for OpenVMS had been converting variables containing times using
the Unix epoch date to and from the OpenVMS-format dates* using the LIB$
LIBRTL calls, and the LIBRTL calls had a documented format limit of 9,999
days.

When 19-May-1997 rolled around, you needed to use a different conversion
sequence for your Unix epoch dates, or to have applied the then-available
LIBRTL 10K Delta Time patch that extended the permitted day field.

More to the OP's point, the longest continuous OpenVMS server uptime I'm aware
of was around seventeen years.

The downside of that being seventeen years of unapplied patches.

*VMS uses 17-Nov-1958 as its base date; that date was chosen to match the date commonly used by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

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excuse-me
Actually "1858" - the base for Modified Julian Days.

Although ironically MJD was invented in around 1958 to cope with a computer
limitation.

vms is also famous for having one of the system time settings specified in
"micro-fortnights"

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ChuckMcM
Heh, if you'd like a real MicroVAX 3900 to play with I can hook you up :-) (or
3100, or 3200, or 3300, or 3400, or 4000/200 or 4000/400 or you get the
picture)

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Oxryly
Totally sour grapes, but I sure get tweaked when I see people doing cool
things with toys that are ostensibly available but that I can't buy yet
because...

~~~
noonespecial
Its not just you. I haven't gotten mine yet either. Should be coming along now
from Newark any day now...

Its funny. My jaw dropped initially, not because of the cool software hack,
but because here was a fellow that had managed to get _two_ raspis!

~~~
egypturnash
You too. Mine's been back-ordered since I ordered it. Which was within the
first 24 hours after the launch.

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jel
"I love it when a (geeky) plan comes together!"

~~~
excuse-me
And the sheer unadulterated wonderful pointlessness of it !

