
A Raspberry Pi VAX Cluster (2012) - awiesenhofer
https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/a-raspberry-pi-vax-cluster
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ChuckMcM
Back when the Y2K thing was a thing all of these little VAXStation VLC's were
being dumped on the market left and right. I had 15 of them at one time with
an average acquisition price per unit of less than that of a Raspberry pi :-).
Even built a 4 unit cluster for fun with a NetGear 4 port switch.

Easier to get RasPi's of course, and even easier to run multiple containers
running simh to get the same experience. I can recommend playing around with a
VAXCluster for while to get a feel for what a nice clustered computer command
line felt like back in the 90's. There are still lessons to be learned for
current developers of "cloud" systems.

~~~
pstuart
> There are still lessons to be learned for current developers of "cloud"
> systems.

Any notes of your own or links on such? I'm old school myself (e.g., my first
computer was a Northstar Advantage), but I never had the pleasure of working
on a VAX.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I kept some notes on my "House of VAX"[1] but really DEC's documentation was a
wonder to behold, binder after orange binder on everything. A lot of that is
online (scanned) on the bitsavers.org web site.

[1]
[http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/computers/vaxen/](http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/computers/vaxen/)

~~~
pstuart
Lots of cool stuff, but I'm curious for your elevator pitch of "VMS could do
<awesomeness> but nobody does this today, if they did, they'd make cloud
computing even more powerful".

Lessons for the lazy, as it were :-)

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cowmix
Ok.. The problem I've haven been trying to obtain a copy of VMS to try out
this very setup. I have tons of old VMS programs I created in college back in
'89 I would love to execute again..

In theory you can get a hobbyist free copy of VMS via this site, but no one
has responded to me from it. The instructions on how to get the license and
binaries are not very clear:

[http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/news.php](http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/news.php)

~~~
inetsee
The page for getting a hobbyist license is really unclear. I finally found 2
links on the page which mentioned the hobbyist license. One link brings up a
warning, and if I say go ahead anyway, I get a file not found message. The
other link does bring up a signup page, but one of the things it asks for is
the name of a "participating chapter" and a "membership number". Can anybody
explain what this is? Do I have to sign up for a membership in some obscure
organization to get a license?

~~~
inetsee
Did some searching (should have done it before I posted). The "obscure
organization" is actually an HP Enterprise User Community, and you can get a
free membership by signing up here: [http://www.connect-
community.org/](http://www.connect-community.org/)

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Zenst
Given the emulation is for a 64MB VAX, would it not be viable to run several
VAX emulators upon a single Rpi and play with clustering that way and removing
the limit of needing two Rpi's with idle resources.

Had a quick search and whilst no clear cut examples jumped out, it seems that
some emulations require multiple instances of SimH running (HP!), so would
appear viable, just some hacking (original definition, not the tabloid
definition).

~~~
ch_123
Newer version of SIMH let you allocate up to 512MB to the VAX instances.

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floren
Neat writeup. I was always a fan of VMS; my university still had a VMS cluster
that was used every quarter for class registration and completely ignored the
rest of the year, but if you poked around you could still find relics of the
old days, like ancient discussion forums software still containing posts from
the 90s.

If I can put on my enormous pedant hat for a moment though, a VAX is a
minicomputer, not a mainframe.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
A MicroVAX was certainly a mini. But the range extended up to the VAX 9000
which was a >$1,000,000 mainframe.

~~~
slavapestov
Well, to be extra pedantic, the latter MicroVAXen used the same enclosure as
the "desktop" VAXstations, except without the graphics and peripherals -- just
serial ports for a VT terminal!

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bra-ket
You might be interested in this job at Lockheed
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20209869](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20209869)

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rutthenut
Aha, I mentioned this yesterday in the 'oldies' thread. Be interesting to see
if others have anything to say on it, or if the idea of a VAX Cluster has
passed most people by.

~~~
rollthehard6
After my initial computing forays with BigTrak, a ZX Spectrum and some time on
a BBC Micro and Apple Mac, my first multi user computer use was on the VAX
Cluster at uni. I hated UNIX when I tried that on a Sun workstation as it
seemed so much less friendly than VMS with it's hierarchical HELP command.
Ironically I went onto to a 25 years and counting *NIX/Linux based infra
career :)

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musicale
SimH is a beautiful thing. I use it to run Multics (and explore the features
that Unix left out.)

Should also be possible to run SimH in a web browser to make a living computer
history museum on the web.

~~~
michrassena
Thanks for this. When the Multics source was released a few years ago, I
really wanted to play around with that environment. It's nice to know there's
something a mere mortal can install and use.

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jdblair
Don't tell Dave Cutler you're running OpenVMS on top of a *nix!

~~~
vaxman
He is the turncoat that brought down the empire. He was full on correct about
Unix though, except that we're not fighting over sub-MIPS resources anymore so
the "waste" created by that architecture doesn't affect the bottom line as
much (unless you're Google hah -donworrydeyreworkinonit).

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hestefisk
This is really cool. Since reading about Masters of Deception, Legion of Doom
And other legendary hacker groups with a thirst for VAXen in the late 80es, I
have always wanted a VAX machine to hack on.

~~~
segmondy
I don't think they were priced because they were a delight to use or hack but
rather because they were nice targets due to the companies using it and what
might be found on them.

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epynonymous
lmfao, absolutely gosu!

+1 openvms

i remember the good old days of setting up vms clusters and good old dcl. we
had easily 96 node clusters, alphas and vax hw, if my memory serves me
correctly.

