On Tue, 13 Jan 1998, Olaf Seibert wrote:

> Ty Sarna <tsarna@endicor.com> wrote:
> >Well, those were the "some of the VAXes" I was referring to in
> >particular.  Surely the desire to run NetBSD on an emulated VAX is no
> >sillier (and perhaps even more defensible than) the desire to run NetBSD
> >on a 11/730?
> 
> How about running V7 on an emulated PDP-11? That is fun, too. I'd
> gladly run an emulated VAX on my BeBox, so as to give my MV2000 some
> company. The virtual PDP-11 on the 2x66 MHz BeBox gives performance
> similar to what I remember from the good old days. And I discovered
> that V7 won't even boot if I install the full 4M of memory.

I don't know about running NetBSD on an emulated VAX... it seems kind of
pointless if NetBSD can run on the machine hosting the emulator.  I mean,
sure... it's an emulated VAX, but it more or less behaves just like NetBSD
on any other platform (except for a few platform-specific bugs :-)

A real VAX is a lot more fun, because the hardware is part of the fun.
The old hardware is interesting in many ways, and it can even be used as a
cheap room heater. :-)  Then there's the coolness factor... it is a lot
more impressive to show a real MicroVAX II with an RA90 drive, QDSS and
VR299 than to just show a unix prompt.

Yeah. emulation can be fun too, but that's only if you're using the
specifics of the underlying hardware in some way.  Emulating the PDP-11
to run PDP-11 OSes or emulating a VAX (or maybe even Alpha) to run VMS are
some of the examples where it would be worthwhile. 

I have to say that I certainly wouldn't be running NetBSD/vax if I didn't
have any VAXen but an emulator was available.

|  Boris Gjenero <bgjenero@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca>              |
|  Home page:  http://www.undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca/~bgjenero/     |
|  "Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to   |
|  depend greatly on our own point of view." - Obi-Wan Kenobi, ROTJ  |