I had access to a VMS system in my BBS days, and I had no idea it wasn't just some hard to use BBS software. When it clicked that it was a real operating system on a giant machine (I believe 11/380) it changed everything for me!
Apparently, the only place the VAX 380 exists is in a writing sample by Pearson Education. Otherwise, there is no evidence of DEC ever producing something called "VAX 380".
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...)
Could be. You could also have been thinking of the 11/730, which was a cost-reduced 11/750 and thus the second-slowest VAX model DEC ever sold.
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.
There is someone on GitHub who's been trying to keep OpenBSD/sgi alive out-of-tree using bits and pieces (e.g: userland binaries) of OpenBSD/octeon, which remains supported.
As I understand it, Loongson is very close to MIPS. I think I remember reading that just 4 patented instructions were removed from the MIPS ISA, and I am not even sure that they were replaced.
If so, that means that new MIPS-family hardware is being made today. And ISTM that represents a new target market or audience for this.
AFAIK Loongson is dead and isn't made anymore, and unlike OpenBSD/sgi, Loongson was a little-endian arch. OpenBSD/octeon is a closer match, but also discontinued as Cavium switched to making ARM CPUs.
LoongArch is a new ISA and isn't MIPS compatible, and OpenBSD doesn't support it.
I didn't say Loogson the company was dead, or that LoongArch was either. I said the predecessor Loongson/Godson CPUs are, like the 2E and 2F, which were MIPS-compatible. They're not manufactured anymore, and were practically unobtainium when they were.
LoongArch is not MIPS, despite it having similarities. It's a new platform/ISA and requires a completely different toolchain and new OS port.
It is not at all "new MIPS-family hardware is being made today" like you originally wrote, and it has little to no relevance to SGI hardware.
You are angrily arguing against things I didn't say and am not saying. I suspect you're downvoting me as well.
I never claimed it was entirely compatible, because it wasn't. Nobody ever said it was.
I'm saying that there are MIPS like architectures still being made today, and I stand by it. You seem to think they don't count. You have not coherently explained why. Maybe they are not close enough for you, maybe the endianness is not the one you want. I don't know and TBH I don't care.
It's close. It's related. There is new hardware in the greater MIPS-like family. If you or Theo de Raadt don't like it, that is not my problem.
You said, although now you're backtracking, that it's dead. That is not true.
I called you on saying things that are not true and ISTM that now you are trying to quibble.
One easy thing I've been doing for years is just dropping the Applications directory onto my dock. Instant launcher. Otherwise I just use spotlight if I want to launch by typing.
I've found it to be very good and accurate at these sort of tasks. I use it all the time to turn some weirdly formatted data into CSV or something else with structure.
This! I've probably said it here before, but Apple won the Unix workstation wars in the most awesome way possible. You can now buy an insanely powerful RISC Unix workstation at the mall! How awesome is that?
NeXT acquiring Apple for less than one Steve Jobs (receiving about $400 million as change) was nothing short of brilliant. They got their great OS, attached it to their own bespoke hardware, focused the product line, and now they pretty much rule the world.
I recently slimmed down Windows 3.0 to run it from a 1MB SRAM card on a MS-DOS 5.0 palmtop. I just did it by trial and error, and I think I can slim it down further from this guide, though they're using Double Space, which I won't have.
I'm always sort of amazed how well Windows 3.x runs on hardware that would have been a bit old even when 3.0 was released.
