I found this video by accident and while watching it, I remembered the recent LCG thread on port-vax. While thinking "Whee, this poor guy was just a teeny tiny bit too early, that has just been fixed!", I later on realized that you were the guy fixing it. Thanks for working on NetBSD on VAX! 🙂
@NCommander Ty, I'm actually learning a lot from your channel! I hope to one day start development on a game where the characters are based on operating systems, and your channel is definitely helping me get an idea of how these systems work. Love the content and streams, keep it up!
NetBSD on everything!! Would love to see it on a Nokia Communicator 9110 and various Windows CE 1.0 and 2.0 handheld PCs, old OG POWER1 and POWER2 and POWER3 IBM servers and workstations, OG PowerPC 601-604 Macs. NetBSD 68K for Macs and Amigas and more, even?! Super cool to see you work through your troubleshooting process, and then work through the fix/patch development. Beautiful video overall. Definitely the step-by-step process therapy needed today! (If you could lend your brain to the ELKS embedded Linux project to get X windowing and SSH working that would be swell too… and show it off on various 8086, 80186, 80286 hardware and NEC V20 and other 16-bit NEC CPUs? That would be super cool)
I installed NetBSD in 1992(?) on my Amiga 3000, shortly before the AT&T lawsuit. Then changed to Debian until Debian and Linux basically dropped the Amiga Plattform. Last Year I upgraded it back to NetBSD. And it just ran. Even supporting my SVGA card through the framebuffer device, although with little acceleration. It is amazing how much NetBSD can do.
In the video some of the code mentions “VLC” models. I used a 4000 VLC Workstation for years in the 1990s, the VLC was rumoured to be short for “Very Low Cost” as it was the cheapest workstation you could buy then.
@@NCommander my dream is to (be able to) rule modern (big iron) servers with pretty old NetBSD machine running 389 directory server. Only the imagination of this makes me smile…
I love that portability to esoteric systems is a real goal of NetBSD. I'm excited to get my PowerBook 180 running NetBSD once some parts come in - what other modern OS could you even dream of running on a 68k laptop with 14MB of RAM?
This video was awesome, i had a blast watching it. Thank you for making it so enjoyable :) Also, i'm every day more and more blown away at how readable NetBSD codebase is, i really want to start getting my feet wet with it on my main pc or my retro-gaming one
Legally, it isn't, and that was something determined in a court of law. This was what caused the lawsuits with USDI originally, and why Linux got popularity.
Nice work! I ran NetBSD on an old Sparc Classic (originally a controller system for a printing press). It wasn't quite as pokey as the microvax, but getting a kernel compiled for it was an interesting experience. It had a good second life as an smtp host until it blew a cap 3 years later. 😊
Use X with this? Find modern uses for the old hardware? And please support! Excited to use with my 3100! What does everyone think about using with Lightweight DIY office suite? Can you port Rust to this - to use various rust TUI launchers and command line programs?
That might be a mistake on my part. I know I looked this up, but I didn't save a source in my notes. NetBSD's list of VAXen doesn't have a release date, so I might have gotten the wrong number written down, but it would be good to know for sure.
@@NCommander Yeah it's hard to find exact dates. I think in 1985 the MicroVAX II and VAXstations like the II/GPX (seems to be December 85) were current. The service information manual for the 4000 VLC is dated November 1991. That fits in with what I know from my dad who worked at the factory that manufactured many of the 3100 and 4000 VAX models here in Ayrshire when they were current. My own VLC came from there in mid April 1992 according to the serial number.
Really cool. Your code rot comment really stood out to me. I was trying to run packet radio (1k2 baud AFSK AX.25 over ham radio) with the compiled ports in NetBSD. Unfortunately, code rot has got to the BBS software, and it crashes when a new user connects and tries to register their home BBS. This stuff seems right up your alley, but not sure if you are a ham radio/packet radio guy. I am not really a programmer, so I am not sure how to go about debugging and fixing the source. I started with GDB, but it's socket simply goes away in a crash and does not seem to do anything in GDB. I am also not sure if the binary is stripped. That is about as much as I know about this process.
I’m a licensed ham (kd2jrt), although I haven't been able to be on air in awhile. There's an amateur radio channel in my discord server which can help of you want to drop by
I seem to recall dropping into one or two of the streams for a short time. Good to see what became of that all 😌 Now I really need to drag out some of my old vax and alpha gear just to bring it back to life
Some years ago I netbooted and installed NetBSD on a MicroVAX ... it was a real learning experience, but I remember mopd under Linux working quite nicely back then...
Sure, but netBSD actually is known to work on the VAX-11/780, the first model, you could theorically run NetBSD 10 on one although I dunno if anyone has tried. You can more say the MicroVAX is what happens when you just make everything way smaller.
Thanks for that interessting video and a different perspective on the topic. I've used MOP for VMS satellites and the configuration of some DECservers, but that keeps you in the DEC world. I hope that you can run Ultrix on that offical unsupported machine :)
Oh I liked the lowlevel driver details and might like more. I have a maxed out Macintosh SE/30 that I’m still trying to get booting NetBSD 10. I would love a video about that :)
Well, that was painful. Couple things I enjoyed on the VAX were DCL and .obj files were linkable in multiple languages. Once wrote a program in Basic, Pascal, Assembly, and linked it all together because I could. What we programmers think is fun can be questionable.
Now run a netatalk 2 server on the VAX to serve vintage Macintosh computers with files...... in theory it should work if the dependencies are available on VAX. Murray Hilll UNIX purist...... now that's a new one.
Congratulations (you get the A). This was the hardest project I assigned to one of my students in a senior level college class some 20+ years ago (he didn't complete it). But the easiest project was to connect up 2 dial-up modems and get communications going between 2 machines (she didn't complete that one either). lol This is a complex project to get done as you need to understand MOP, then Netparms and BootP just to get a kernel running. Then while working from memory, get nfs running and mount the rest of your operating system (on another machine). Then you can format the drive, install NetBSD and hopefully it will boot it (using only a network connection and a hard drive). It can be done. I left my VaxStation 3600 at the college in case anyone wanted to attempt the feat in the future (that is a MIPs based machine anyway). I still have my AlphaServers and a MicroPDP-11/53 which were more valuable in my mind. Let me know if you want to try some DEC 16-bit projects. ;-)