wickensonline.co.uk Retrochallenge 2009 Winter Warmup Entry Index |
Retrochallenge 2009 Winter Warmup Entry
This page contains information about my entry to the Retrochallenge 2009 Winter
Warmup. The retrochallenge competition is held bi-annually and requires entrants
to spend a month on a project involving retro hardware and/or retro software.
The term retro describes software or hardware that are more than ten years old.
The competition main page can be found here[1].
My entry focusses around a DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION (DEC) VAXstation
4000/90. This is a desktop VAX that was originally sold between 1991 and 1993.
List price at the time for a basic model was in the order of £17,500. My model
was bought in 2004 for £80. It contains an 72Mhz NVAX processor and 80MB of RAM.
I will be using it as my only computer in January and will be writing some
software on it (see the introduction for more details).
Entrants to the competition are required to keep a diary. The posts below
contain entries to my diary. If you are interested in my project, please check
back during the month of January 2009 as I will be making regular updates.
If you would like to be notified when new diary entries are posted please email
me at: mark@wickensonline.co.uk.
POSTS
24-DEC-2008 Introduction
A gentle introduction to the project including aims and
objectives.
27-DEC-2008 Documentation
A description of the way in which these HTML pages were created.
28-DEC-2008 ALLIN1
DIGITAL's Integrated Office Applications Suite.
05-JAN-2009 Remote Control Unit Application
Development of the Remote Control Unit application.
05-JAN-2009 Playlist
My retro music playlist.
07-JAN-2009 Exceptions
Problems I've encountered or situations where I've had to
fallback to using another box to get a job done.
08-JAN-2009 Programming 1
Getting to grips with OpenVMS-specific programming in the 'C'
language.
11-JAN-2009 Programming 2
Simple SMG$ Hello World! application and command line processing
with the CLI$ routines.
12-JAN-2009 Hardware Issues
Temporary keyboard woes and general keyboard chit-chat!
13-JAN-2009 Performance
A real rough-and-ready comparison between performance of the
VAXstation 4000/90 and my IBM X60 Thinkpad.
13-JAN-2009 Applications
A gallery of applications that I've been using on the VAXstation
during the course of the month.
15-JAN-2009 Programming 3
Hacking TCP/IP examples using QIO calls to read the port status
from the Mirrorbow IO controller.
26-Jan-2009 Recess
My belated half-way random rants post-holiday.
29-Jan-2009 Programming 4
Completing the Mirrorbow IO controller application, including
the SMG (terminal) interface.
30-Jan-2009 Conclusions
Closing thoughts on this years entry and some ideas for the
summer challenge ahead.
ENDNOTES
1. Retrochallenge Home Page