Azog-Thoth@cup.portal.com (William Thomas Daugustine) (02/01/91)
I personally own a coupla peices of DEC equipment, and just lately, questions concering licencing have come up, and I need some info on thing, or where I can find out for sure. Ill describe each case. One machine is a PDP-11/34a. I purchased this almost a year ago (or so it seems). The person who I got it from was a second owner, myself being the third owner. The machine had RK05 type drives, and ran RT-11 v4. Shortly after I got it, the disk packs died on me, and I have absolutly no backups. Hence, I have no operating system at this time. My concern is getting a new (read replacement) OS for it. The case being as it is, how can I do this, without paying big bux to DEC for a new software license? I once read that the license was machine dependant, which seems to imply that even tho I am the third owner, I should be able to get a legal replacement OS for either free, or a minor charge. Is there anyway for me to find out who had the original license, and what exactly the license was for, or am I pretty much barking up a wrong tree? The second case is more difficult. This concens a VAX 11/730 I got a few months back. I know who I got it from, but dont know if he was the original owner, or if he had a license for it. It is running VMS 4.4, which I am quite satisified with. But again, Id like to find out who had the license, and if it is transferable to me? One minor point of interest is that the VMS is an unpatched version of VMS. Not having a whole lotta experience in this stuff, I would think that that means there wasnt a license?? (on a machine I work on, when we upgraded from VMS 5.0 to 5.2, we got a patch tape, and some other written material concerning licensing. I am aware that licensing was greatly increased from 4.x to 5.x, but am sorta lost in the sauce at this point) Any one shedding light on this, and I will be extremely grateful :-) Thanx Billy D'Augustine Azog-Thoth@cup.portal.com