DCE/RPC NamedPipe Transport emulation

[Peter Samuelson]

  [me]
> > Except ... I guess DEC discontinued the VAX some time ago,

[John E. Malmberg]
> Yes, 2000 or 19100 as Luke goes by sometime was quite a while ago.

Wow - I had no idea vaxen were still in production that late.  I would
have guessed that they sold the last one four or five years ago, after
the Alpha platform had gained a solid foothold.  I guess DEC didn't
want to let down the legions upon legions of VAX hackers, some of whom
were still out spending money on their favorite CISC platform.

> VAX is still a supported platform for OpenVMS.  Only of handfull of
> VAX systems are no longer supported for running OpenVMS.  Most of
> those are systems that did not directly support more than 4M of
> physical memory or a local disk that was larger than 150 Mbyte.

Understandable.  There's no reason everything all the way back to 1980
should still be supported by the latest OS release.  As Linus Torvalds
was once heard to say, "if you haven't upgraded your hardware in the
last ten years, why are you upgrading your OS?"  (This was in the
context of continuing to support the original IBM XT hard drive
interface from circa 1982.)

> New Alpha systems that are faster than currently available systems are
> planned to be sold for about 10 years according to the Compaq web site.

That's great news.  I may buy an Alpha one of these days after all.
I've always wanted one.  I understand they are the best value per cycle
in the 64-bit market, especially for floating point.  (Not that I do a
lot of floating point, or a lot of 64-bit for that matter, but I do
think it would be fun to have an Alpha.)

> Unlike the VAX platform, LINUX runs on the ALPHA platform.

There *is* a Linux-for-VAX project out there.  I guess a few months ago
they managed to boot to a shell prompt.  At one point they hit a major
snag with memory management -- it seems that in order to do page tables
in a quasi-Linuxy way, the page tables would take up a double-digit
percentage of total memory.  (I have no clue on the details.)
Presumably the Linux/VAX port isn't yet ready for prime time.

Oh well, off topic for all three lists.  I think I'll quit posting now.

Peter