2019/03 RetroChallenge...

Well due to my abysmal entry last time and the fact that I've got another mini retro enthusiast due to be born in April I'm going to keep this time around pretty simple.

MicroVAX 3100

Ok so on a random whim I bought a MicroVAX 3100 with a VT520.

I used to use a large VAX mainframe at the first company I worked for. We developed a retail management product for multiple platforms but the original version ran on VMS.

I remember writing lots of C code to convert saved data from the Cobol system on the VAX to a newer 4GL version in Informix.

The mainframe always used to fascinate me, over the time that I worked there we would often configure various machines for our customers. One of the coolest was an 8 million pound machine that had 8 processors, I remember setting up software on it and testing the speed on it, it was amazingly fast at the time.

I was lucky enough to get to login to lots of different machines via modem all of which caused us headaches as the OS was different on them along with the endianness so we had to program structures to handle the data conversions to raw values.

They eventually did away with the VAX mainframe (I did consider at the time offering them some money for it but it took up the whole room and I didn't have anywhere to store it) and emulated the whole machine on a standard PC which I think it actually ran faster than the original hardware. 

So I'd like to have a play with the VAX and possibly try to install the latest OpenVMS version onto it.