> > 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).
> 
Mmm.... Lisp.  All those parens everywhere.

> 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.
> 
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.

[snip]
> i loved the vax even as late as 1988.  that was one of the reasons i took a
>
Oh wow.  I was 7 years old at the time.  Yes, you are reading that right.
Seven years old.  All I knew then was how to do some stuff in AutoCAD,
play LHX, and program in BASIC.  Ick!

> 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.
> 

Well, it is better than once the IA64 finally comes around, and having
people trying to bring back the 8088.  I doubt that will ever happen.  The
vax architecture is just too nice to let it die.

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.

Regards,
John Havard