I thought the: “Oddly enough IBM still managed to not only sell PowerPC based kit, but AIX hasn’t seen a new version since 2015” was a rather strange statement as well. (1) IBM sold PowerPC machines up until 2009, and that really is irrelevant to AIX on POWER5/6/7/8/9. (2) Itanium never had ANY effect on POWER/PowerPC sales (IBM joined in the fun and sold a few Itanium systems to throw everyone a bone), it’s worth mentioning HPE had to pay intel to refresh another batch and sue Oracle to continue support for Itanium. (3) POWER chips will always be selling as long as z/OS, IBM i and AIX continue to rake in billions.

I guess if the machine still works, and the textbooks are working, why not… lol

They had one machine left running VMS while I was there, likely an Alpha. They were still teaching VAX assembler in 2002! Eventually that system was retired at the end of 2004 when vendor support ended for it.

Lots of places that were moving away from the VAXen behemoth’s were going down the path of SUN.. I don’t recall that many going the ways of DEC Alpha, IBM POWER or HP HPPA, but it did happen. It sure was amazing the difference from being one of 60 users online on a VAX 8600 to being farmed out onto the new and exciting Ultra’s..

It’s not entirely free – as https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ notes, the “Extension Pack” isn’t free for commercial use so you need to buy an “Enterprise License”. Various options available starting at $1220 per socket for the first year.

My guess is that most people who want to pay for a product like this buy VMware Workstation, but maybe there is a market for it, such as if some integrator sells you some form of all-Oracle “solution”.

I suppose the VirtualBox team is a lot smaller than the SUN team was, so it’s probably got less of a target painted on it.

Disclaimer: This is all uninformed speculation.

Then I must have not gotten it to properly grok my setup properly. That was Slackware64-14.1, and I now have Slackware64-14.2 available. Suppose you aim your work arrangements towards our host, and I’ll collect them.

I was more so involved in the good olde days of 3.2 back on the POWER machines, and 4.x on the early PowerPC. After that I wasn’t working at a bank to pony up the big dollars for the hardware & software so that pretty much ended that.

XLC/XLF was sure fun to fight with… It’s amazing how things got better once we got GCC compiled from source, and later on the fine GNAT folks who provided pre-compiled binaries. A UNIX without a C compiler, really is a fish with a bicycle.

For sure, in the 90’s the premier internet serving platform was SUN Solaris. Which is why the first thing we did in that port was get it running on Solaris again, then pivot away once we had it running, as the 90’s are over, and nobody goes forward with Solaris anymore… It’s legacy support at best.