71–80 of 93 posts
I had an account there years ago but never really saw the point. I was already SSHing in from a shell, just to end up at another, different one. Kind of whimsical I guess, but ultimately of scant practical use.
In the 90s and even into the 2000s getting an email account that had shell access was really nice; there were things you could do that would have been hard to do locally. It’s much less needed now.
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It looks entirely made up because the procedure described is also entirely alien to me, and I had professional experience with both VMS and Ultrix when they were still supported by DEC. (And it's certainly not BSD...)
I know I just made it up! I have an 11/23+ and I'm guessing I was thinking of that 3!
The slowest would be the 11/725, which was a cost-reduced 11/730 that had a reduced clock speed and half of the bus slots filled with epoxy to limit expansion. The 11/725 was so slow that using it was an act of masochism; It was slower than your 11/23+.
Those models were pretty rare though. Even though they were cheaper than an 11/750 the performance drop from the 750 to the 730 was too severe to justify even the reduced cost. If that were all then maybe replacing PDP-11s being used in industrial applications might have saved it but the 730 was still too expensive versus the existing PDP-11 products, and the 725's limited expansion made it less attractive than those same PDP-11 products. The PDP-11 thus outlived both the 725 and the 730.
Finally got to log into a vms system! I was looking to do that over 20 years ago but never could find one. Somehow I still remembered most of the shell syntax in a book I read about it probably in 2001. Don't ask me ... I don't know how either. Got bored in about 10 minutes but still, another box checked off!
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the VMS shell had so many good ideas. If i ever write a shell, I'm including VMS style abbreviations. If there is any modern POSIX shell that implements such a feature, let me know, because if there isn't I have to write one
Not quite the same, but fish shell has programmable abbreviations. I type “tf ” and it expands that inline to “opentofu”. It use to say “terraform” before we upgraded; I didn’t even have to change the commands I type.
I've been fortunate enough to know Stephen Jones of SDF through his running of the local Seattle retro computing event (now rebranded as VCF PNW) He's an absolutely kind soul who is deeply interested in all kinds of retro projects. I wish there were more folks like him in tech generally
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I'm curious, do you know which virtual machines (i.e. what emulator and what OS) you would want? Does the software exist and it's just a matter of the time to set it up? Or is it harder to get ahold of all the necessary old software (even if you have the emulator)? Maybe in the modern age someone could make a "polarhome in a box" that offers a similar gamut of systems, but via preconfigured emulators that you can sim…
On Polarhome, I used QNX, SunOS/Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and OSX. Having those running under qemu would be quite the challenge. Until now, I have used qemu (or rather qemu-system-aarch64 in combination with binfmt-misc) on Linux to emulate e.g a Raspberry pi running on arm64. This works very well, but for e.g. Solaris or HP-UX there is the extra hurdle of getting hold of bootable media that will not freak out in the unfam…
KVM (x86 and x86_64): Linux, BSD, OSX, Hurd, Haiku, MSDOS, Minix, QNX, RTEMS, Xenix, Solaris, UnixWare, Windows 95 through 11.
QEMU (for non-x86): AIX 4, Linux (m68k, arm, sparc, powerpc, mips, riscv), OSX (ppc), Solaris 8 (sparc), SunOS 4.1.4 (sparc), Windows NT 4 (mips)
SIMH (for old DEC computers): NetBSD, VMS, Ultrix, RSX-11M, RT-11
Some of them can be quite finicky to get to work. Xenix was especially hard.
Solaris 11 is quite easy to get running in QEMU/KVM though. You can download the media from Oracle.
The only real hardware I routinely run has either Debian Linux, macOS, or Raspberry Pi.
I run a public unix(openbsd) shell for fun, I call it my social network platform it sort of sucks, no users, ip6 only, a bunch of vm's on an old underpowered router running in my closet. But feel free to stop by and set up a .plan if you have nothing better to do. ssh to applicant@register.public.outband.net instructions at https://www.public.outband.net note that it's ip6 only. It is pretty pointless, nobody needs o…
This is not true at all. I have been a member of SDF for over 15 years now and I use it all the time. Most recently, when HostPapa tried to tell me my sftp issue was on my end, and I told them that I was able to recreate the problem from the west coast and the east coast; my home on the east coast and SDF on the west coast. Finally they listened and fixed my issue ... that was on THEIR side, not mine. I like having the ability to compute from different parts of the country, as it lets me do things like that.
I found a way to escape their shell (so you can run whatever you want), if you're not verified, it involves multiple steps to archive this. I mailed them 2x to their membership address, but since today no reaction. I asked also in their IRC. Just a question to HN: should I wait more, try again? Or should I simply publish the vulnerabilities somewhere? If yes, where? It's my first time that I found a vulnerability at…
I found a way to escape their shell (so you can run whatever you want), if you're not verified, it involves multiple steps to archive this. I mailed them 2x to their membership address, but since today no reaction. I asked also in their IRC. Just a question to HN: should I wait more, try again? Or should I simply publish the vulnerabilities somewhere? If yes, where? It's my first time that I found a vulnerability at…