thanks VSI

[mark.preston]

I guess i've come full circle now that i've retired. I started out in college on DEC hardware and my first job was with PDP/VAX hardware. I was a sysmgr for over 12 years before Boeing started replacing VAX/Alphas with HP hardware. Since I was running oracle rdbms on VMS and filling the DBA role i switch to DBA full time and left Boeing. Now that i've retired 30 years later i discovered OpenVMS is still around and signed up for the community license. I have openVMS running under KVM/QEMU on Fedora 38. I'm remembering more about the OS than i thought i would and discovered i sorely need a DEC keyboard as i miss that GOLD key so much lol. Thanks you VSI for making this available. Maybe i'll come out of retirement once i dust off my OpenVMS skill set.

[reinhardtjh]

I'm not from VSI, but welcome back!

I started with DEC PDP-11/70 in the late 70's at college. Went to college at Rose-Hulman in Terre Haute where we got a VAX-11/780 in the summer of '81. Left school and went to work as a BASIC programmer at DePauw University to convert their PDP BASIC Plus 2 code to VAX-11 Basic. Became the SysMgr there and worked on the eventual upgrade to a 2 VAX 8350/MV II cluster running Oracle RDBMS V4.0.7 (8?) Moved to Cincinnati and eventually became a contractor working for DEC at Wright-Patt AFB in the Wright Research Labs as an Oracle DBA and assistant SysMgr. We had an 8600, 8650, 8550 and a 6220 in a VAXCluster. The contract ended in '94 and kicked around various places doing Oracle work but in '98 ended up again as VMS SysMgr/Oracle DBA for Fluor-Fernald where we had a dual VAX 7620 cluster and an AlphaServer 2100. Eventually upgraded the VAXes to a dual DS20/single DS10 cluster and was written out of the contract in Dec (!) 2002. Since then I've been Oracle DBA exclusively except at home where I've had a variety of Alphas and Itanium systems. Moved to Texas in late 2017, gave away a lot of kit and now I have a MicroVAX 3100 M95, 2 DS10's, an RX2660 and some x86 OpenVMS systems running.

[sms]

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> [...] i sorely need a DEC keyboard as i miss that GOLD key [...]

      https://forum.vmssoftware.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=9038#p20958

[soutbarr]

I guess i've come full circle now that i've retired. I started out in college on DEC hardware and my first job was with PDP/VAX hardware. I was a sysmgr for over 12 years before Boeing started replacing VAX/Alphas with HP hardware. Since I was running oracle rdbms on VMS and filling the DBA role i switch to DBA full time and left Boeing. Now that i've retired 30 years later i discovered OpenVMS is still around and signed up for the community license. I have openVMS running under KVM/QEMU on Fedora 38. I'm remembering more about the OS than i thought i would and discovered i sorely need a DEC keyboard as i miss that GOLD key so much lol. Thanks you VSI for making this available. Maybe i'll come out of retirement once i dust off my OpenVMS skill set.

Erm, I don't think GOLD Key exists on normal terminal command line. I'm not sure though as I'm pretty new. I DO know if what you mean is the GOLD Key for commands in the EVE editor you do not have to have a DEC keyboard. If you want a DEC Keyboard because you miss it go get one, if GOLD does work for normal command line yeah I think you need it. Otherwise as part of the EVE Editor local configuration file you can have the command

SET GOLD key_name

in your EVE config file then after for your EVE session you have a GOLD key

[sms]

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> Erm, I don't think GOLD Key exists on normal terminal command line.
> [...]

   Who claimed that it did?  It's <PF1>.  The program accepting input is
responsible for determining how it interprets programable-function keys.

> [...] GOLD Key for commands in the EVE editor [...]

   Or EDT.  Or other programs.

> SET GOLD key_name

   Or DEFINE KEY in EDT.

   But if decades of experience have trained you to know where the GOLD
key is, and/or you expect to find three small keys above <ENTER> on the
keypad, then a Windows-typical keyboard is not a satisfactory
replacement.  As I've stated, an Apple keyboard satisfies me.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_key_(DEC)

[soutbarr]

Thanks for the information about the gold key btw. I was aware EDIT/EVE could do it, but wasn't aware the base command line could.

[arne_v]

Note that DCL also has a DEF/KEY.

Try:

$ def/key/term pf1 "write sys$output ""Hi from PF1"""

and hit PF1.

[sms]

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> [...] wasn't aware the base command line could.

   If by "the base command line" you mean the DCL command language
interpreter, then I don't believe that it does, by default.

   So far as I can tell, by default, DCL treats <PF1>, <PF2>, <PF3>, and
<PF4> the same as <Ctrl/R>.  That is, it displays a tidy edition of the
current command line.  This can be seen more clearly with a hardcopy
terminal.

ITS $ set terminal /hardcopy

   For example, type ten characters ("abcdefghij"), delete five
characters, type five more characters ("vwxyz"), and then hit <Ctrl/R>
or one of the <PFn> keys:

ITS $ abcdefghij\jihgf\vwxyz
ITS $ abcdevwxyz

   I wouldn't be amazed if this behavior were documented someplace, but
my only use the <PFn> keys is in a DEC editor (so far as I can
remember).

   Of course, DCL does offer DEFINE/KEY, and that has /<various>_STATE
qualifiers, so I suppose that one could define a kind of DCL GOLD key
that way.  As shown in:

      HELP DEFINE /KEY Examples

  I've never seen anyone use DEFINE /KEY, but I tend toward minimal
customization of that sort.

   There's also SHOW KEY, but I'm unaware of any list of what "DEFAULT"
means for all keys.

[arne_v]

Of course, DCL does offer DEFINE/KEY, and that has /<various>_STATE
qualifiers, so I suppose that one could define a kind of DCL GOLD key
that way. As shown in:

HELP DEFINE /KEY Examples

I've never seen anyone use DEFINE /KEY, but I tend toward minimal
customization of that sort.

35 years ago I used DEF/KEY.

Back then my LOGIN.COM was 500 lines.

And I could actually remember all of it. Today my LOGIN.COM is 25 lines and I can only remember half of it.

[alexwong]

Being semi-retired now, I mess around with the x86 vmdk too under virtualbox. My first job in the early 80s was junior programmer, porting Fortran programs from Prime to VAX 11/750. I remember back then there was no source level debugger so we had to debug in machine language. Did all kinds of support and sysmgr roles over the years including a stint with Digital in the late 90s.

Just wondering, is your keypad missing the NumLock key? I use putty as VT emulator on the PC and the NumLock works fine as GOLD in EDT. I think the only missing LK201 specific key is the - for DEL W. Putty uses the + key as the , for DEL C.