Running NetBSD/vax

September 24, 2005 | Computer Science, General | By: Mark VandeWettering

Screendump of My Vax

Well, above is a screendump of my latest computer acquisition: a Microvax 3800 which I installed NetBSD on. Wackiness!

What’s even more wacky is that it didn’t cost me a cent. Well, maybe that isn’t so wacky, after all, would you pay money for a Microvax? 🙂

Basically, I’ve been on a bit of a retro kick lately, what with the Atari 2600 programming and all. While goofing around, I noted that you could run the latest NetBSD 2.0 release on simulated Vax hardware. So I compiled the simulator port, downloaded the vaxcd.iso file, and did it.

Et voila! It works.

Probably even runs faster in emulation on my lowly 1ghz Via C3 box than the real thing. 🙂

I know, this is one of the more useless things I’ve ever done, I just had to share.

Comments

Comment from Masato Sato
Time 8/24/2010 at 10:58 am

Hello, Sir.

Can I use the following image for my blog ?
https://brainwagon.org/images/vaxsmall.png

VAX is one of my good memories, so I want to use this image very much.

Sincerely,
Masato Sato

Comment from Mark VandeWettering
Time 8/24/2010 at 10:59 am

Sure, go right ahead. 🙂 This is a bigger version of the image you asked for.