Hi Rich: I started as a true MACRO-20 Assembler Systems Programmer on a DECSystems20-60 myself as well. A good friend of mine actually has a KL10 running today in a virtual machine on his Mac. For those who must have a COMND jsys fix, he did "something along the following lines: - I built an Ubuntu Linux VM (Ubuntu is free and fairly easy to set up, so it was a natural choice -- CentOS might be another good choice, as it is essentially "RedHat for free". - Once you have the VM set up (and know how to become superuser): . open a terminal window. . become superuser. . obtain a copy of the Panda distribution containing the KLH20 emulated DEC-20 with TOPS20 V7 included. - You'll basically be unpacking the Panda distribution, which creates a "panda-dist" subdirectory, then you'll enter that subdir, make a couple of INI file edits, then lauch: ./klt20 - Then there are a series of boot commands that follow, after which, TOPS20 is up and running. All of the rest is in the README (which is a plain ASCII text file)." /jsi (they plural of "jsys" :) On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 10:13 AM, Rich Jesse < rjoralist2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Dick writes: > > > Why? I started out on VMS MANY years ago, VAX/VMS. When DEC > > I started on a DECSystem 20 running TOPS-20. When the VAX 4000 series (I'm > ashamed I forgot which!) came in, I hated it. Whatdya mean I can't just > hit > TAB for command completion? DCL? Ewww! It's so complex! Of course I > learned to love it (via the Orange Wall) and see why VMS was superior in > many many ways. > > Then came Alpha. The CPU came out of the gate at 150Mhz which was blazing > in the day. A rough ride on the conversion, but that shear speed was worth > it. > > Only problem was that big companies were writing for Unixes first, then > trying to port to VMS. One main difference between the two OSs is that > process creation is relatively quite expensive compared to Unix, but the > ports never quite got that. It made them slow in comparison and it seems > that the wonderful OS took quite a beating for that. > > DCL and the OS overall was (is?) very elegant compared to any Unix shell > scripting. There's true error handling. There's no need to haphazardly > parse program output that can change depending on when it's run (e.g. > idiotic date formats from ls) since there was an actual API. > Bullet-proofing scripts was really quite easy in comparison. > > > I remember one Oracle or IOUG article which stated that "DBA's > > should be the agents of change". Well here you are, your now an agent > > of change. > > Yup. While I really miss the power and elegance of DCL, I'll never have to > deal with running out of NPAGEDYN ever again. > > > BTW: We have A VMS server here, no support folks in > > operations, and I can't wait till it hits the dumpster. (Kept me up all > > night Tuesday when it decided to fry a couple of CPU's.) > > The OS didn't cause that CPU to fry...just sayin'. :) > > I finally recycled my Alphastation 500, Sun Ultra 5, and Sun Ultra 10 just > a > few months ago. I'm sure the "geek" at the big box store didn't know what > they were. > > Rich > > Disclaimer: Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a > new heel for m'shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they > called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was > the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those > days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Gimme five bees for a > quarter, you'd say. Now where was I? Oh yeah. The important thing was > that > I had an onion tied to my belt, which was the style at the time. You > couldn't get white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could > get > was those big yellow ones... > > -- > //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l > > >