For many people of a certain age, the DEC VAX was the first computer they ever used. They were everywhere, powerful for their day, and relatively affordable for schools and businesses. These minicomputers were smaller than the mainframes of their day, but bigger than what we think of as a computer today. So even if you could find an old one in working order, it would be a lot more trouble than refurbishing, say, an old Commodore 64. But if you want to play on a VAX, you might want to get a free membership on DECUServe, a service that will let you remotely access a VAX in all its glory.
The machine is set up as a system of conferences organized in notebooks. However, you do wind up at a perfectly fine VAX prompt (OpenVMS).
What can you do? Well, if you want a quick demo project, try editing a file called NEW.BAS (EDIT NEW.BAS). You may have to struggle a bit with the commands, but if you (from the web interface) click VKB, you’ll get a virtual keyboard that has a help button. One tip: if you start clicking on the fake keyboard, you’ll need to click the main screen to continue typing with your real keyboard.
Once you have a simple BASIC program, you can compile it (BASIC NEW.BAS). That won’t seem to do anything, but when you do a DIR, you’ll see some object files. (LINK NEW) will give you an executable and, finally, RUN NEW will pay off.
Some quick searches will reveal a lot more you can do, and, of course, there are also the conferences (not all of them are about VAX, either). Great fun! We think this is really connected to an Alpha machine running OpenVMS, although it could be an emulator. There are tons of emulators available in your browser.
“The machine is set up as a system of conferences organized in notebooks.”
uh, what? Is this some kind of Newspeak?
This post was written by AI “Williams” so probably GPT hallucinations.
Is HAD actually using AI for articles?
I think he was making an AL vs AI joke…. No, we do not use AI for articles.
That’s just the sort of thing an AI would say…
(I kid, I kid)
No; they use a DEC product called OpenVMS Notes (formerly VAX Notes). Each user has a set of ‘notebooks’ which store info on which Notes Conferences the user has a membership of.
VAX Notes predates (and was the inspiration for) Lotus Notes.
It’s pre-web terminology that was used in the 90s by the Compuserve online service. For example, it used “conference” instead of the more common term “forum”. I assume that was the inspiration, given the similar name “DECuserve”.
I remember it as DEC Notes, we used it for social networking in something like year 6 or 7 B.I. (before internet). Now that I’m reminded of it, what we did seems somewhat strange but also familiar from the modern perspective: people were spending their free time in the faculty’s terminal room to take part in online forums, but they all had to be present at some time in that same room because the system was accessible only from it. I did actually know / meet some of them in person and I knew who some of them were but not everyone. But it was a new thing and great fun. And when Facebook appeared decades later, it was nothing special.
headline says “vax”, banner clearly says “alpha”. do better, a.i. williams.
I hate to be the pedantic one, but Alphas are not VAXen. Just as a x86-64 machine running OpenVMS is also not a VAX. DECUServe appears to be hosting things on a (virtual) Alpha these days.
Sorry, I clicked report comment by accident.
Right, but one could turn that argument around. The only thing I remember about the real VAX is the terminal, I don’t think I even know what a VAX machine looks like, let alone what’s under the hood. So it might have been a cloud virtual server for all I know :)
As someone who fixed the things, I can assure you they were anything but virtual.;-)
There’s a reason they were called ‘big iron’ – although this post does appear to refer to one of the babies – microvax, or even the alpha – the real thing was never (in the UK at least) the territory of a school. Of course, if the original poster was US based, ‘school’ means something different..