For the same reason one visits a museum. If that doesn't make sense to you, then doing this won't either.

Unfortunately, I am working for an aerospace manufacturer that runs VAX VMS on emulators (which are quite expensive). We also run an even older operating system, OS2200.

The original VMS system manager who moved from 7000 series hardware to emulation was somewhat inquisitive, and we did install VMS 7 on simh. He retired and passed away some years ago, and none of his replacements have wanted to touch simh. I find that apathy appalling.

Given who wrote it, simh seems as close to an official VAX emulator as you are going to get.

The Charon/Stromasys sales staff described it as a toy.

In 1990's, maybe. Today simh-classic it's serious stuff up to the point a fork was made because some nut tried to tamper 1:1 disk/tape images with custom headers.

If you cannot learn from history, you'll have no future too, man.

That's why so many of these new age development tools, libraries and abstractions are such incredibly janky pieces of bloat that literally require what a few decades ago was supercomputers.

All downhill from here.

For nostalgia sake. It's from the computing period when there was a great influx of good idea's but still a huge shortage in memory and storage.

> a huge shortage in memory and storage

Maybe this explains why we have to call "creat" to "create" a file.

Idk about creat specifically but the utility names are all terse because you were interacting with the system on a 110-baud teletype.

For me, it's a chance to experience what it was like to use and develop software on these systems back in the day. For example, lately I've been writing some small apps and adding new kernel features to a variant of V6 Unix running on my PDP-11/05. It's humbling to see what it really took to be productive on these systems.

Some people even did y2k patches to BSD 4.3. Also, tons of 'modern' software could run on it you can get GCC 2.95 and GCC 3.4. Lynx, for instance. Or gopher and IRC clients. And, maybe, with a bit of luck, Lua and JimTCL.