[HECnet] Connected to MIM on my VT420

On 30 Mar 2013, at 01:23, "Mark Benson" <md.benson at gmail.com> wrote: On 29 Mar 2013, at 23:29, Cory Smelosky wrote: Not extremely interesting all of you have probably seen this a million times before on your own gear. ;) But! I brought up a SIMH instance on my Raspberry PI, connected the console to my USB to serial adapter, and used it to connect to MIM using my VT420. ;) I'll eventually use a DECserver but for now this is what I have. ;) http://gewt.net/pics/vt420-mim.jpg (apologies about the picture quality can't quite keep my damn hands perfectly steady) (also, my connection to MIM keeps dropping I need to figure out what the cause is) To me that's the pinnacle of emulation. Connecting REAL peripherals to an emulator to get close to the REAL experience. I did a bit of testing of Mark Pizz's serial port code for terminals against my VT510 just because I wanted to be able to do real, direct serial terminal work against an emulated VAX or PDP-11 and so I made sure it was tested some so it got into 4.0. There's something rewarding about rattling away on a VT510 talking to a tiny board that draws a lot less power than the VT. :) It is indeed rewarding. :) The RaspberryPi is great for lower-end VAX and PDP-11 emulation. It only musters about 1-2VUPs at best running the uVAX 3900 so isn't a huge deal faster than the early 11/7xx series machines. Still my Area router is a rev. 1 Raspberry Pi running raspbian and SimH. It's been running 24/7 for almost a year :) It most definitely is. I chose VMS 5.2 for a reason. ;) mark at raspi1:~$ uptime 03:46:15 up 54 days, 5:29, 1 user, load average: 0.23, 0.17, 0.14 We get occasional power outages (hence the short uptime) and I never got around to buying a UPS (if my computer stack goes off I just grab a torch and read a book and wait for the power to come back :P). How long are the outages usually? (I have some UPSes and some generators. Basement floods if power is out too long) I have 2 more RasPi's in the 5.25" bays of a 2U unit now too, one that will be running as a PDP-11/93 and one that will run as a VAX 11/780. They share the 2U with a Atom D410MO motherboard that will run my VAX work machine (it's about 20x faster than a RasPi). The thing is jury-rigged so the Pis run of the 5V line on the ATX PSU via a Molex. It has a GBit hub inside and 2 NICs on the Atom board (alas only 10/100) that are bridged so it only needs 1 ethernet port to attach the whole box. It's neat and save for some soldering, I built it myself. I originally built it for hosting a VAXcluster but I really have no use for one. That is an awesome setup. http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixel_mason/sets/72157630752112422/ Oh, incidentally, Gregg, the Optiplex is probably round that way so it keeps him warm at his desk. If that were a desk, that would be true. ;) I have an ancient (well 2004-ish) P4 3.0 HT that I use for Windows XP 32-bit now I'm on Win 7 64-bit (I have legacy hardware devices that don't have any 64-bit drivers). It's a Dell Dimension 4600 motherboard that's been reboxed with a new case and PSU with a cute ducted cooling fan for the P4 made of plasti-card, duct tape tape and a 120mm fan. Which reminds me, I must put Pathworks32 on it this week :) Personally, i'd run NT 4 on a P4 (shame it doesn't seem to like HT P4s ). I prefer it to XP. ;) -- Mark Benson http://DECtec.info Twitter: @DECtecInfo HECnet: STAR69::MARK Online Resource & Mailing List for DEC Enthusiasts.