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I got my start on OpenVMS at DECUServe 5 years ago: https://raymii.org/s/blog/My_first_OpenVMS.html

Friendly community!

But now OpenVMS is available on x86 and you can run it in VirtualBox yourself: https://raymii.org/s/blog/OpenVMS_9.2_for_x86_Getting_Starte...

Hey! Thank you very much for your blog, got (again) into OpenVMS X86 because of it!

BTW when do you blog about a cluster setup? ;)

It's on my todo list! I hope to integrate it with some modern software like haproxy or the built in Apache fork, next to file sharing etc.
ATM i test OpenJDK with Yacy, clustering Yacy via OpenVMS is next ;)
Samba for file sharing? I led development efforts for the first Samba release on VMS (IA64) working at HP. It was not performant enough compared to ASV but we were on the right path.
I've worked with VMS in the early 90s. Still my favourite operating system, and I'm really happy they ported it to the x86 architecture.
How come? What about it do you appreciate?
It's a shame polar-home closed. [0]

Polarhome was a free project where you could obtain a shell on many different operating systems. Nothing fancy hosted on some guys Swedish internet within his basement of servers. Discovered it when I was 13 and that brought me in to the world of Unix, Linux and Minix. Hosted my first ever blog, introduced me to shell's and compiling Apache to your own shell, I weep on how you can now click a button and have some $webinstance. I miss those times.

While reminiscing, credits to a guy called Stingray who I met on try2hack.nl in the Netherlands who gave me my first ever box hosted on his home net. I feel privileged for the freedom of internet I had back then compared to now. Folks just don't know.

Talk about triggered. Oh look, FreeBSD finished compiling.

>>> World build completed on Sat Nov 18 11:44:33 GMT 2023

>>> World built in 973 seconds, ncpu: 80, make -j79

[0] http://polarhome.com/

You know i was thinking since years doing something like sdf.org but with jails. Where every user has a jail for themselves, but also a instance where every user can login into the same system ala sdf.
There are some old unix shell providers still floating around. I'm still a active user of sdf.org
I recall back in the earliest 90s anybody could get a free telnet accessible shell account on one of the GNU ai.mit.edu servers. I used one like that for a time.

Really was a different Internet back then.

What’s the secret to getting an application for an OpenVMS community license approved? I’ve gone through the process and replied to the email, etc. three times in the past six months.
Can you login into https://sp.vmssoftware.com ?

The license and everything else is there.

I don't think so? I don't know what username and password I would use. (edit: after reading your message to someone else in similar straights, I'm curious: what is this login screen?)

I've done the form here, several times:

https://vmssoftware.com/community/community-license/

And clicked on the email confirmation link("Visit the following link to confirm your request") after receiving the email, several times. That's it, that's all I know.

Try with your email and reset the password
It says my email is not found, which does not surprise me, since this appears to be something I never signed up for.

I will admit to some amusement at this error:

Error 404: Email not found.

Is that what this 404 message I keep seeing on the internet means?

Thanks anyway! I guess I could email somebody on their team or something.

Thank you for sharing. This is awesome.

To everyone here who wants to try running OpenVMS natively today, they can run it on an x86-64 machine (includes AMD processors). Check out VMS Software and apply for a community license.

I first encountered VAX/VMS on a VAX 11/780 at Rose-Hulman in 1981, and was in awe of a machine that could do a million floating point operations per second!

Recently, I got one running in SimH in my android phone, and it runs OpenVMS 7.3. Telnetting into the VAX in my pocket was something I just had to do.

I too haven't been able to get a community license for the x86 port, yet.