> Okay, so back to my plan I was talking to people about a few weeks ago,
> and somebody else mentioned on the list.  Take a fast PC, write an
> emulator that will fit in the bios, and flash the bios with it.  It is
> better than nothing, and would be sort of a vax, but not really.

yes it would still be a vax.  several real vaxes were microcoded to the
extent that there was no hardware support for any vax aspect of the system:
not the instruction decoder, not the ALU, not the registers, not the virtual
memory -- nada.  "being a real vax" as more to do with passing the tests
matt mentioned than with how it's implemented.

> ... The vax architecture is just too nice to let it die.

so was fairchild's clipper.  in fact it was even prettier.  but it's dead,
and intergraph (who bought the rights to it) is now selling pentium boxes.

so was nec's v70.  i don't see any systems being built with those, either.

"let it die" is all about "how many people need it to live, and how much
will they pay".  unless someone who wants it to live has a lot of money that
they just want to piss down a hole and never see again, it's dead.

> Something unrelated to the vax stuff.  If you ever decide to get rid of
> CNAMEs, I will have to thwart you.  They are just too conveinient.  Go
> ahead and make an updated DNS rfc and make CNAMEs officially exceptable if
> you haven't already.  I am sick and tired of seeing "we'll get rid of
> CNAMEs one day" and things like that.  Either do it, or make them
> accepted.  Sorry, just had to vent my spleen over that.  Was working on
> about 400+ zone files last night.

there's never been any plan to deprecate cnames, and they exist very
officially.  but what's not supported is MX or NS RR's that point to CNAMEs,
or CNAMEs and other data all hanging at the same name.  i'm definitely going
to get rid of those, and there's nothing you or anybody else can do to stop me.
my mind isn't entirely made up on the subject of multiple CNAMEs at the same
name.  (a number of ISC's BIND support customers depend on this, so it's likely
to stay, but it may become optional with the default "off".)