Personal Alpha

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Not sure if there is much demand for this, but there is a FREE (personal non-commercial) Alpha (Digital/Compaq/HP) emulator available called Personal Alpha which runs under Windows XP/Vista/7: http://www.stromasys.ch/charon-vax-axp-alpha-hp3000-sparc-virtualization-technology/charon-axp/download-personalalpha/

The Alpha architecture was a 64bit replacement for the Digital VAX 32bit hardware, and the venerable VAX Operating System: VMS was ported over to it, as well as Digital's OSF/1 UNIX which became Digital UNIX and ended up as Tru64 UNIX.

It's a little tricky to get hold of Tru64 UNIX these days, but one can obtain an up to date Hobbyist version of OpenVMS for approx. £20, which includes all of the "layered products" (you'd call them "apps" these days!) http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/news.php.

To obtain the licenses so that you can run everything (OpenVMS uses licenses to activate EVERYTHING!), you need to join a "Chapter" - some of these are quite costly, but decuserve.org is FREE (details of joining and obtaining licenses here): http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/1416

HP have an OpenVMS Documentation Portal: http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/index.html

The impact that VMS had on the computing world during the 70's, 80's and 90's can't be ignored. It was one of the first O/S's that had full networking (DECnet), it was the first to develop clustering, and a bullet-proof clustered file system, it's also one of the most secure O/S's that was ever produced and has a granularity of permissions that is unsurpassed by any other O/S, which is why it is still in use in major financial institutions, and Lottery providers across the world.

As I'm a Mac user - I use Parallels to run Windows on my Mac, and have happily run Windows XP with the Personal Alpha emulator running in that without any performance issues at all!

It's a great little product if you just want to keep your skills in with OpenVMS and DCL scripting etc... or perhaps setup a rock-solid web-server that'll be difficult to hack!

 

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Thanks for the heads up FB