https://raymii.org/s/tags/simh.xml RSS feed for tag simh on Raymii.org https://raymii.org/s/blog/The_sad_state_of_Alpha_emulators_for_OpenVMS.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/blog/The_sad_state_of_Alpha_emulators_for_OpenVMS.html OpenVMS 7.3 was the last version for the VAX architecture. All later versions (like 8.4) are only available for the Alpha CPU architecture or Intel's Itanium platform. Since I don't want hardware running, which is suprisingly hard to get in The Netherlands, Alpha machines, I want to be able to run it in an emulator. simh is the best open source VAX emulator, but it does not support Alpha. My adventure with es40, the only open source Alpha emulator (development halted 10 years ago) ended prematurely since it crashes all the time. The only other available options are FreeAXP, Charon-AXP, vtAlpha and EmuVM AlphaVM. Only FreeAXP is available as a free (but not open source) download, Charon had a personal version but that is nowhere to be found nowdays, vtAlpha doesn't offer a trial or free version and EmuVM Alphaserver also stopped with their free version. In this article I'll go over my adventure with FreeAXP and EmuVM. Mon, 30 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT Fri, 30 Jun 2023 22:31:00 GMT https://raymii.org/s/blog/AXPBox-version-1.0.0-released.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/blog/AXPBox-version-1.0.0-released.html Last year November, I posted on a new OpenVMS related project, AXPbox, the open source Alpha emulator, a fork of es40 by Tomáš Glozar. I got involved a bit in the project, submitting a few patches here and there, editing the Wiki and thus now have contributer rights on the github repository. After discussing a bit back and forth with Tomáš, I put together the first official release of AXPbox, very exciting news. The release can be found here on github. This article has the release notes and a bunch of screenshots of OpenVMS inside AXPbox running GUI applications over the network. Sat, 23 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT Sat, 23 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Installing_OpenVMS_8.4_Alpha_in_AXPbox_with_networking.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Installing_OpenVMS_8.4_Alpha_in_AXPbox_with_networking.html In my previous article I announced the fork of the `es40` emulator to `AXPbox` by Tomáš including bug fixes and rework allowing it to install OpenVMS 8.4 without problems. Since then I've contributed a few patches and doc updates, now NetBSD boots as well (the patches for netbsd were from other es40 forks). I've also looked into getting networking setup, since that is a bit of a tedious process due to pcap and linux, pcap being used for network emulation. SIMH (among others, a great VAX emulator) suffers from the same problems with networking. This guide will show you how to install AXPbox and get OpenVMS 8.4 ready and running with networking inside AXPbox. It's a rather long guide with a lot of information and output. Wed, 04 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT Sun, 08 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://raymii.org/s/blog/Exciting_OpenVMS_Alpha_emulation_news_es40_has_been_forked_to_axpbox.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/blog/Exciting_OpenVMS_Alpha_emulation_news_es40_has_been_forked_to_axpbox.html Back in 2018 I was playing around with OpenVMS a lot, as it continues on the legacy of the PDP-8 and PDP-11. OpenVMS 7.3 on the VAX emulated via SIMH runs perfectly, OpenVMS 8.4 for Alpha was kind of a disaster, or, the es40 emulator was. Real hardware is available via IslandCo, but shipping to the Netherlands is horribly expensive. The only options back then for emulation of Alpha were FreeAXP or AlphaVM, both paid, closed sourced products with watered down free versions. Nothing wrong with that, it enables us to play around, and now that OpenVMS is in the hands of VMS Software with an x86 port coming along we may hope for a bright future ahead for OpenVMS. VSI currently provides a hobbyist version, but it's a FreeAXP bundle for Windows only. Recently I got an email from Tomáš regarding his fork of the es40 emulator, axpbox. This short post is intended to give this emulator more visibility and exposure, since I find this to be amazingly cool and exciting. It lists the bugs fixed and new features, which allow OpenVMS 8.3 and 8.4 to install perfectly. Wed, 28 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT Wed, 28 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://raymii.org/s/articles/Creating_an_OS8_RK05_system_disk_from_RX01_floppies_for_the_PDP-8_with_SIMH.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/articles/Creating_an_OS8_RK05_system_disk_from_RX01_floppies_for_the_PDP-8_with_SIMH.html This guide shows you how to build an RK05 bootable system disk with OS/8 on it for the PDP-8, in the SIMH emulator. We will use two RX01 floppies as the build source, copy over all the files and set up the LPT printer and the PTR/PIP paper tape punch/readers. As an added bonus the article also shows you how to get text files in and out of the PDP-8 sytem using the printer and papertape reader / puncher. Wed, 07 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT Tue, 07 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://raymii.org/s/blog/Multiple_passwords_for_one_user_UIC_uniqueness_and_the_system_password_on_OpenVMS.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/blog/Multiple_passwords_for_one_user_UIC_uniqueness_and_the_system_password_on_OpenVMS.html In the book I bought about OpenVMS for the previous post on filesystems, 'Getting Started with OpenVMS by M. Duffy', I've read a few interesting things in the chapter that introduces user accounts and system login. Namely that a user can have multiple passwords, that user ID's are not unique and that there can be a system password. This article goes in to those three topics. Sun, 13 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT Sun, 13 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://raymii.org/s/blog/OpenVMS_Mount_ISO_and_execute_scripts.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/blog/OpenVMS_Mount_ISO_and_execute_scripts.html I'm playing around with OpenVMS on Alpha using a trial of AlphaVM Basic, but was not able to copy paste in my Hobbyist License. I suspect Putty pasting too quickly, so I had to get the license script on the OpenVMS, without using the network. In this article you'll learn some OpenVMS filesystem history, how OpenVMS handles line endings and in the end I get my license installed by creating an ISO with the script on it. Tue, 08 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT Tue, 08 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://raymii.org/s/blog/File_locking_grep_and_process_killing_on_OpenVMS.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/blog/File_locking_grep_and_process_killing_on_OpenVMS.html On the DECUS OpenVMS system there is no curl or wget installed. I wanted to download a remote `C` file to play around with the compiler and some simple Hello World code, to get a feel of the build system. After a bit of searching around the internet I was not able to find a command like curl or wget to download a remote file. But, the searches led me to the OpenVMS port of curl, which, I hoped, might be able to run on the DECUS system. Just like on a linux system, running the binary under my user account, not install it system wide. This ended up to be another adventure in which I figured out how to trace a locked file to a process, grep the output of a process on OpenVMS and kill a process. I did not get curl to work or compile my code, yet. Sun, 06 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT Sun, 06 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://raymii.org/s/blog/Installing_the_es40_AlphaServer_emulator_0.18_on_Ubuntu_16.04_and_trying_to_install_openVMS_8.4_on_es40.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/blog/Installing_the_es40_AlphaServer_emulator_0.18_on_Ubuntu_16.04_and_trying_to_install_openVMS_8.4_on_es40.html OpenVMS 7.3 is the latest version of OpenVMS for the VAX architecture. Since the DECUS system uses OpenVMS 8.4 there were some version differences. I could not set my 'BACKSPACE=DELETE' on 7.3. The hobbyist license also covers the Alpha and Itanium versions of OpenVMS so I want to try the Alpha version, which is consequently also 8.4, the latest release. This article describes my attempt to compile and install the es40 open source Alpha emulator on Ubuntu 16.04 and subsequently the installation of OpenVMS Alpha. The emulator is not under active development since 2008, and the installation of OpenVMS fails. OpenVMS does boot however, very very slowly. Tue, 24 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT Tue, 24 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://raymii.org/s/blog/Small_OpenVMS_titbits.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/blog/Small_OpenVMS_titbits.html Here are some small titbits I found out this week on the DECUServe OpenVMS system. Not enough to write a blogpost on their own, but collected together. Sun, 22 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT Sun, 22 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://raymii.org/s/blog/OpenVMS_7.3_install_log_with_simh_vax_on_Ubuntu_16.04.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/blog/OpenVMS_7.3_install_log_with_simh_vax_on_Ubuntu_16.04.html Using a guide I was able to install OpenVMS 7.3 for VAX on simh on Ubuntu 16.04. This is a copy-paste of my terminal for future reference. This is not one of my usual articles, a guide with comprehensive information an background. Just a log of my terminal. Mon, 16 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT Mon, 16 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://raymii.org/s/blog/File_versioning_and_deleting_on_OpenVMS.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/blog/File_versioning_and_deleting_on_OpenVMS.html I'm now a few weeks into my OpenVMS adventure and my home folder on the [DECUS](http://decus.org) system is quite cluttered with files. More specifically, with different versions of files, since OpenVMS by default has file versioning built in. This means that when you edit a file, or copy a file over an existing file, the old file is not overwritten but a new file with a new version is written. The old file still is there. This is one of the best things in my humble opinion so far on OpenVMS, but it does require maintenance to not have the disk get filled up fast. This article goes into the PURGE and DELETE commands which help you deal with file versioning and removal. Sun, 15 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT Sun, 15 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://raymii.org/s/blog/Backspace_and_delete_key_behaviour_on_OpenVMS.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/blog/Backspace_and_delete_key_behaviour_on_OpenVMS.html While working on the DECUServe OpenVMS system I found out quickly that pressing BACKSPACE moves the cursor on the shell to the beginning of the line instead of deleting the character to the left of the cursor. This made me very aware of my typing, since when I made an error I had to retype the entire line (the terminal is in insert mode it seems). After reading through some documentation it seems that is default behaviour but there are terminal options to change it. Mon, 09 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT Mon, 09 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://raymii.org/s/blog/SSH_public_key_authentication_on_OpenVMS.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/blog/SSH_public_key_authentication_on_OpenVMS.html My OpenVMS adventure continues, after my rabbit hole of folder removal, this time I actually get public key authentication working with OpenSSH so that I don't have to type my password to login. Thu, 05 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT Thu, 05 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://raymii.org/s/blog/Delete_a_directory_in_OpenVMS.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/blog/Delete_a_directory_in_OpenVMS.html My OpenVMS adventure continues, in this small item I talk about the removal of folders on OpenVMS. As you might expect, different than on linux. This rabbit hole got started when I made a typo in the creation of a folder, which I created in the process of SSH public key authentication. Pubkey auth still doens't work but my OpenVMS knowledge increased. Tue, 03 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT Tue, 03 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://raymii.org/s/blog/My_second_OpenVMS_-_MAIL.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/blog/My_second_OpenVMS_-_MAIL.html Last week I registered myself with the DECUServe OpenVMS system. I found out how to navigate the filesystem and create files and folders, it was awesome. This week I learned how to use the OpenVMS MAIL program to read and reply to an email I got from George Cornelius, another user on the DECUServe system. Sun, 01 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT Sun, 01 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://raymii.org/s/blog/My_first_OpenVMS.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/blog/My_first_OpenVMS.html Last week I registered myself with the DECUServe OpenVMS system. I also registered with HP as an OpenVMS hobbyist and got OpenVMS 7.3 for VAX. This small blog item describes my first steps with the hosted DECUS OpenVMS system. I'm excited since I now know how to create folders, navigate the filesystem and edit files. Oh and I had a nice chat with another OpenVMS user via the PHONE program. Sat, 31 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMT Sat, 31 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://raymii.org/s/articles/Running_WPS-8_(Word_Processing_System)_on_the_DEC(mate)_PDP-8i_and_SIMH.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/articles/Running_WPS-8_(Word_Processing_System)_on_the_DEC(mate)_PDP-8i_and_SIMH.html This article covers running WPS-8 on a modern day emulator. WPS-8 is a word processor by DEC for the PDP-8. The PDP-8 was a very populair 12-bit minicomputer from 1965. WPS-8 was released around 1970, it came bundled with DEC's VT78 terminal. This terminal bundle was also known as the DECmate. This article covers the setup of the emulator, simh with the correct disk images and terminal settings. It covers basic usage and the features of WPS-8 and it has a section on key remapping. The early keyboards used with WPS-8 have small but incompatible differences with recent keyboards, but nothing that xterm remapping can't fix. Thu, 09 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT Thu, 09 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://raymii.org/s/articles/Toggling_in_a_simple_program_on_the_DEC_PDP-8_and_PiDP-8_using_the_switch_register.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/articles/Toggling_in_a_simple_program_on_the_DEC_PDP-8_and_PiDP-8_using_the_switch_register.html In this guide I'll show you how to toggle in a simple program on the DEC PDP-8 or the PiDP-8, or in a front-panel simulator named BlinkenBone if you lack the hardware. I have a replica of the PDP-8/I (the PiDP-8) but lacked the actual knowledge on the front panel and switches to get started and do something cool. This guide has step by step instructons, with pictures, and basic explanation. After all, what is an expensive blinking light panel without fun stuff to toggle in? Wed, 08 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMT Wed, 08 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMT https://raymii.org/s/articles/Running_TSS_8_on_the_DEC_PiDP-8_i_and_SIMH.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/articles/Running_TSS_8_on_the_DEC_PiDP-8_i_and_SIMH.html In this guide I'll show you how run the TSS/8 operating system on the PiDP replica by Oscar Vermeulen, and on SIMH on any other computer. I'll also cover a few basic commands like the editor, user management and system information. TSS-8 was a little time-sharing operating system released in 1968 and requires a minimum of 12K words of memory and a swapping device; on a 24K word machine, it supports up to 17 users. Each user gets a virtual 4K PDP-8; many of the utilities users ran on these virtual machines were only slightly modified versions of utilities from the Disk Monitor System or paper-tape environments. Internally, TSS-8 consists of RMON, the resident monitor, DMON, the disk monitor (file system), and KMON, the keyboard monitor (command shell). BASIC was well supported, while restricted (4K) versions of FORTRAN D and Algol were available. Sun, 26 Jul 2015 00:00:00 GMT Sun, 26 Jul 2015 00:00:00 GMT https://raymii.org/s/articles/Running_ADVENT-on-the-PDP-8-with-SIMH.html?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=raymii&utm_campaign=tagrss https://raymii.org/s/articles/Running_ADVENT-on-the-PDP-8-with-SIMH.html In this guide I'll show you how run the classic Colossal Cave Adventure game on a PDP-8, emulated by the SIMH emulator. The PDP-8 was an 12 bit minicomputer made in 1964 by DEC, the Digital Equipment Corporation. We will install and set up SIMH, the emulator with a RK05 diskimage running OS/8. We will use FORTRAN on OS/8 to load ADVENTURE, then we use our brain to play the game. As a bonus, I also show you how to edit files using EDIT, and show you a bit of the OS/8 system. Thu, 23 Jul 2015 00:00:00 GMT Thu, 23 Jul 2015 00:00:00 GMT