To introduce myself I am Nick, I live in Melbourne, Australia, I am a keen collector of DEC. I'm not a VMS expert, I have mainly been running other OSs. But I hope to get to VMS eventually when I have time.
I am writing here because a friend has inherited an enormous collection of DEC, he has pretty solid plans how to distribute it all to good homes and what should be preserved and what can be scrapped. But it is an enormous project as he has 20~30 years worth of systems big and small, hundreds of TTYs, monitors, etc...
So one of the vexing issues he has is documentation, there are hundreds of boxes of complete manual sets for all versions of VMS (he mentioned 3.0, 3.1, and, 5.0 as far as I can recall). These are probably going to be got rid of. I would consider scanning them for hobbyists to use, but before embarking on such a project...
(1) Is the complete documentation history already available from HP, obviously if they have original PDFs and not scanned PDFs and they are accessible to hobbyists then there is no need for me to scan anything.
(2) Would HP be willing to license these materials to be put onto Bitsavers, apparently, my friend has contacted Al Kossow (Bitsavers founder) and he has said he is not allowed to put VMS documentaiton up.
(3) Would anyone like to have the original manuals shipped to them, I can't say definitely but I imagine my friend would be willing to do it for the shipping cost plus perhaps a nominal fee to cover the cost of his time.
(4) How about original installation materials, I haven't checked but we probably have enormous quantities of original tapes and CDs and so on with VMS on them. Is anyone willing to pay shipping plus nominal costs? I could try to read these and put them online, but I suspect this would be a bridge too far for HP to endorse.
malmberg January 18 2021 New Hobbyist PAKs for VAX/VMS are no longer available according to reports. Only commercial licenses are reported to be for sale from HPE
dfilip January 16 2021 Can someone please point me to hobbyist license pak? I'm looking for VAX/VMS 7.1, DECnet Phase IV, and UCX/TCPIP ... have the 7.1 media, need the license paks ... thanks!
malmberg September 05 2020 VSI community non-commercial licenses for AXP/IA64 are available now.
malmberg September 05 2020 See the forum about licensing. Don't know if HPE hobby licenses still being issued. Commercial licenses still being sold.
silfox70 September 01 2020 I need the license for OpenVMS7.3. Where can I find them?
malmberg August 29 2020 Eisner, which is currently being moved, got an SSH update and the keys were updated to more modern encryption standards.
jiml July 11 2020 ssh to eisner is now giving (on linux) "WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!" , Has the server key in fact changed ? Of WHO can we ask that somewhere on the eisner webpage they
wyan May 06 2020 Turns out I had an account here, it still was set to my location a decade ago, so hey, I'm back after over a decade!
Hein April 21 2020 Hi all, haven't been here in years. Good to see it is all there still. I'm looking around at the forum to stop/start msipcap - 'could not be stopped' - for now. I'll shutdown FreeA
EstesDave January 09 2020 does anyone have or know of DRB32 manuals
