Modern BSD Computing for Fun on a VAX!

Trying to use a VAX in today's world

Do you have a spare mainframe lying around? In this talk, we'll take a look at installing, running, and attempting to use NetBSD on actual VAXen. Trying to perform modern computing tasks on this aging architecture is becoming increasingly infeasible with the rise of encrypted connections as the norm. We'll look at what is actually possible on your spare VAX.

NetBSD still supports the VAX architecture from Digital Equipment Corporation, and adventurous users can install the latest NetBSD release on these machines. Would you really want to, though? We'll consider two VAX machines, a relatively common VAXstation 3100 (which will be present) and a far more powerful VAX 4000/200 QBus machine (which won't fit in my car) as example systems. Starting with installation, we'll look at the challenges these machines present simply due to their processing power.

While NetBSD does support these systems, using pkgsrc to get your software can be…