In article <199801100604.BAA19372@dbit.dbit.com> you write:
> Think there'd be a market?  I think it would be feasible (although still
> pretty difficult) to replace E11's CPU emulation and do a good job of at
> least the Unibusish VAXen (since the peripherals are the hardest part and
> they're the same as for the PDP-11, except the RHes I guess), but would
> there really be a point?

I dunno, is there a point in using some of the VAXes people are running
NetBSD on, other than "because it's there"? It'd give some of the
ability to play with NetBSD/vax without having to buy (and feed!) the
hardware. Or worse for some folks, justifying it to their spouse.

If the emulator presented an emultion of a simple network interface that
talked to /dev/tun, you could network the emulated vax with the real box
it was hosted on. And you could even run it under itself -- IBM's VM,
but for Vax Unix :-)

And actually, having a virtual box (not necesarily a VAX) could be
useful for some security-type applications.

Or hey, run VMS under NetBSD :-)

> Maybe you're thinking of Fundamental Software's Open/370?  If so it costs
> $7500 if I remember right but supposedly does a great job (translates rather

Didn't know about that one. I was thinking of a freeware one.

> than interpreting so the speed is good).  Of course you could just run
> AIX/370 instead of porting NetBSD, but while you're at it you might as well
> just drill holes in your skull and let the evil spirits out the easy way.  I
> used to use it at RPI and under some circumstances the C compiler would choke

Ditto (and I mean *DITTO* -- it was aix.rpi.edu). That's what got me
thinking about NetBSD/370 :)

> on its *own* include files!  Piece of crap.  Luckily the machine was running

Yup.  And AIX/370 and AIX on rs6k's were *totally* different.  NetBSD
and Linux have more in common than they did.  And both totally broken of
course, in completely different ways.  Still, AIX/370 was a lot more
stable then the rs6k's.

> VM so there were more sensible OSes available.

Well, sensible is a matter of opinion, I guess.

Still, would have been neat to run AIX and NetBSD head-to-head on the
machine and see how badly AIX lost.  :)