HP/DEC/Compaq

I think the local stock exchange used to have VAXstations for people to do software development on, I was busy crawling under the floors, which is odd because I am a software developer and was a software developer at that time not a cable guy, it was decades ago and that floor in that building is now a gym. The stock exchange is now in another building altogether.

R.

There are often, not always, differences to the larger boxes, and each company's engineering standards certainly come into play - probably depends on which year you pick too - but you'll see these controllers up into the mid-range systems at least. Very often the bus behind the controller is the difference, and then the number of these controllers - low-end systems making due with one controller on the single system bus, high-end systems supporting a dozen on a dedicated I/O bus...

Often the only difference was whether or not the framebuffer was plugged in, and a jumper being switched on the motherboard.

Early VAXstations* were performance- and cost- competitive with other CISCy UNIX workstations, but they faded pretty quickly as RISC reached the market. By 1989 DEC introduced the VAXstation 3100 and the MIPS-based DECstation 3100 just about side-by-side, with the MIPS-based DECstation about 3 times faster. The DECstation line was absolutely needed to stay competitive in light of Sun's SPARC, HP's PA-RISC, etc.

If you wanted VMS, you needed a VAX. Many VAXstations got added to clusters anchored by larger models, allowing the primary user(s) to have a graphical workstation and increasing the horsepower of the whole cluster. VMS sites often used the built-in batch job management features to distribute workloads to available CPUs/systems throughout the day, so you could get a lot of bang for your workstation dollar in that kind of environment vs. cyclic utilization of many commercial UNIX workstations. (While people found lots of ways to address that, with VMS it was there out of the box. Well, after you paid for a cluster node license... )

VMS allegedly had good real-time support, and I worked with groups in an academic setting where they would use VAXstation II's for process- or instrument-control and data recording, then afterwards have the machine in question reboot into a cluster to off-load the data and start processing it in batch mode using faster CPUs in the cluster. The control node would then reboot into standalone mode the next time it needed to run one of these real-time tasks. Seemed pretty neat in 1989-90.



* VAXstation I - 1984; VAXstation II - 1985; VAXstation 3200 - 1988

Well, a couple of decent (read: overpriced!) 68-to-50-pin converters (with high-byte termination) and an IBM/Plextor CD-ROM drive from my RS/6000 solved my SCSI woes, and a huge old NEC LCD monitor allowed me to get video working, so that's that out of the way. Now I just need to navigate my way through the OpenVMS install process...

The docs will walk you right through it. http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/73final/6630/6630pro.html

Well, I've got some miscellaneous extra install files on another CD, and I figured out how to mount the CD from the DCL prompt, but I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out where it's mounted to. I'm working my way through the OpenVMS User's Manual, but in the meantime, is there a quick/simple guide to how the VMS filesystem hierarchy works?

You're probably best served by the (Open)VMS User's Manual. You can browse it online here: http://www.openvms.compaq.com/doc/73final/6489/6489pro.html , and HP has the PDF for downloading here: http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/731final/documentation/pdf/ovms_731_users.pdf . If the formatting of the HTML version is hard to read, give the PDF a shot.

Edit: Oops, you already tried that. Let's continue then...

If the going still seems tough, you could try getting a faster start from the Space Telescope Science Institute: http://www.stsci.edu/ftp/documents/system-docs/vms-guide/html/VUG_1.html It's got some details for their installation, but might prove a little more approachable if the DEC/Compaq/HP docs aren't doing it for you.

Can anyone tell me what parameters I should use for SET TERMINAL to match whatever the VAXStation 4000 graphical console emulates? I can't find much in the way of manuals for the graphical option boards, so I don't know if they specify or not. I would bet that I can just tell it to be a VT-100 and have no problems, but it'd be nice to know exactly what it's supposed to be.

John, do you mean the VS4000 console in "glass TTY" mode, e.g. no window system running? To be honest I'm not sure it does support anything like decent terminal features.

If it is in console mode, did you have trouble installing DECwindows, starting it, or did you opt-out during the installation? I think it's pretty straightforward to install DECwindows after the fact, get the media mounted and run one or two DCL scripts, but I'd have to hit Google...

Yeah, the guys on comp.os.vms informed me that the graphical (i.e. non-serial) console is basically a glass TTY. I didn't have DECWindows installed at the time because I was having a little trouble with the installation kits, but I got that resolved (unzipping them on the PC and burning a CD with the unzipped files missed some metadata that was apparently important,) so DECWindows is now up and running and the question is irrelevant.

On to trying out DOOM

<Ash> Groovy! </Ash>