MCKEEVER@UMKCVAX2.BITNET (07/15/87)
Mic Kaczmarczik at the University of Texas Austin asks about VMS emulators
that run under UNIX. He also makes mention of ELXSI's VMS emulator. Since
I am probably one of the only people on BITNET who actually has an ELXSI I
thought I would take this opportunity to talk a little bit about the beast
(we have serial number 95).
Mic was right in saying that ELXSI has an emulator for VMS but it does not
run under their UNIX derivative ENIX ("E"LXSI U"NIX"). It is called EMS
("E"LXSI e"M"ulation "S"ystem) and runs under the ELXSI's native mode
operating system EMBOS ("E"LXSI "M"essage "B"ased "O"perating "S"ystem).
EMS appears to be a 'shell' on top of EMBOS. It's command language
interpreter ECL (you figure it out), seems to just translate the standard
DCL commands into there EMBOS equivalents and execute the command. All
files you can access from EMBOS you have access to from ECL and vice-versa.
ECL also provides an EDT editor written in 'C' that is close, but still has
a way to go. There are seperate compilers for ECL though, that support
actual calls to VMS system services. I created a quick FORTRAN program
on our VAX that converted an ASCII time to a binary time via SYS$BINTIM,
set the timer to go off after said binary time with SYS$SETIMR, and waited
for the timer with SYS$WAITFR. I FTP'd this file, unchanged, directly to
the ELXSI, compiled, linked, and ran it, and it worked! I was really
surprised! There are still some incompatabilities between VMS FORTRAN and
EMS FORTRAN but it is considerably better than it was. One thing you have
to remember though is that the ELXSI is a 64 bit machine, and anything you
write that depends on 32 bit overflow doesn't work (i.e. home grown random
number generators).
Here's some vital statistics on our ELXSI some netlanders may be interested
in. It's a 6400 with two 6410 CPUs, 16 Meg. of memory, 32 asynch. terminal
ports, a 800/1600/6250 tape drive, and two 411 Meg. Fugitsu disk drives.
We have 3 operating systems, EMBOS, ECL, and ENIX. Under EMBOS we have
Pascal, "C", and FORTRAN. Under ECL we have Pascal and FORTRAN. And under
ENIX we have FORTRAN, "C", and ADA. We haven't run any benchmarks on the
system, but each processor appears to have the same power as an 8650 (an
8650 on campus runs a monte carlo simulation in 22 hours, the ELXSI runs the
same program under EMBOS fully optimized in 21.5 hours on one processor, we
haven't parallelized the program to run on both processors yet).
I could go on and on. For the most part, as far as speed, the ELXSI is a
screamer. The software on the machine is another matter all together. I'm
spoiled I guess, but I'm used to determinate, mature, operating systems (VMS,
no flames from UNIX lovers please). EMBOS is a cross between UNIX and VMS
and seems to have missed the boat on both. It has UNIX shells, and UNIX
pathnames. The EMBOS environment is more friendly though, but carries it
to the opposite extreme from UNIX; TOO MUCH VERBAGE. I mean: AcctLimit,
ReReadGroupFile, SetSecurity, ShowSecurity,... It's logical, and legible,
but typable? I make too many mistakes, and like UNIX, you can't abbreviate
commands, you have to define aliases. Like every system it has it's +es
and -es. If anyone wants to know more about the system I would be glad to
send them more information. And if anyone can tell me how to get to Mike
Townsend at the University of Chicago via BITNET I would greatly appreciate
it. He has an ELXSI also and two heads are better than one. Or is that
2-CPUs?? All for now...
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UMU UMUMUMUMUM
UMU UMUMUMUMUM Brian McKeever
UMU UMUMUMUMUM
UMU UMUMUMUMUM University of Missouri Kansas City
U UM U Computer Science
U UM UM UM 4747 Building Rm. 219
UMUMUMUM UMUM UMUM 5100 RockHill Rd.
UMUMUMUM UMUM UMUM Kansas City, MO 64110
UMUMUMUM UMUM UMUM BITNET: MCKEEVER@UMKCVAX1
UMUMUMUM UMUM UMUM
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