> Actually, I've been thinking about this.  Since we couldn't do it, why not
> get the likes of somebody like AMD, Cyrix, or even *gasp* Intel?  If we
> get enough people together to get them to purchase atleast the Vax
> architecture and to create Vaxen that would be at a cost low enough where
> I could afford it, they might just do it.  That would most likely be
> cheaper for all of us, and it would make the company that does it look
> friendly towards us freakish Vaxmonger types.

i think the lesson of building special purpose hardware to emulate once-
popular software is that the market you're selling into is shrinking, not
growing, and that it's very hard to even keep the company's doors open let
alone build equity in a way that pays off the (necessary) investors and
lets you give competitive employment contracts to your (necessary) developers.

symbolics is still in operation.  so that's an architecture that's not
entirely dead yet, although the company as it's been reconstituted is focused
on support and refurbishment rather than on new designs (software or hardware).

there was a company who built pdp10 clones after dec stopped doing it, but i
don't think they ever sold one to someone who didn't already own some real
pdp10's, and i don't think they're still in business now.

the trend is toward new architectures that are fast enough to emulate the old
ones at faster-than-original speed.  and the trend is toward portable source
code that can just be compiled native on new architectures.

outside the wintel combine, there are no lockins (hardware or software) and
that's honest-to-god the way it ought to be and it's what we all fought for
back when everything everywhere was a lockin.

i loved the vax even as late as 1988.  that was one of the reasons i took a
job at decwrl -- they had lots of vaxes, and yum yum i sure loved those vaxes.
i still have three vaxes on my home net and two on my work net.  but there is
no way i know of to get investors and managers and developers involved in a
company to continue the vax line.  it would be a labour of love, with few
customers and those few diminishing every day.