vSphere Client for Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX81

[Gustavo Amoros]

Hello everyone

I built a small vSphere client for commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX81 and compatible.
For testing, I used 4 nodes in a cloud datacenter running ESXi hypervisors with a VMWare vSphere virtualization platform. Those 4 nodes, in turn, run about 100 virtual servers.

I connect to that network having a certificate through a VPN client.
I make that connection from a PC that can be Linux or Windows from my local network. I leave that PC an open port to which I connect via Wi-Fi with my C64 or via modem at 300bps in the case of Sinclair and that is how from the Commodore 64 I can manage the more than 100 hosts that run in the cloud.
For sinclair, currently in version 0.02 running on the "EightyOne" emulator.
The hardware that I am going to use to run it bare metal is:
- ZX81, TS1000 or CZ1000
- RAM Memory Expansion of 64 kb: Gladstone
- Dataset: Timex Sinclair TS2020
- Modem: Timex Sinclair TS2050 (Westridge obtained from New Old Stock)
- Printer: ZX printer or Timex Sinclair TS2040 (Alphacom 32)

I leave some images here.

[Michael Price]

Gustavo,

I'm old enough to remember all that hardware and when it was all new. I was a kid when most of it came out. To be honest, I'm amazed you even have working versions of any of it. It probably would be worth money to some museums that specialize in technology to acquire working versions. I'm guessing most people who read this thread will have no idea what a Timex Sinclair and Commodore 64 were. While probably totally pointless, its still impressive that you actually managed to write something that can be used to manage vCenter from systems with such limited RAM capacity. By any chance do you have a VIC-20 too? That was my first PC, and I remember when I wrote my first program that used all 4K of the RAM it had. When they came out with the C64 I was like "wow that has so much more RAM than the V20..." but by that time I mad moved on to an Apple ][.  :)

Regards,

Mike

[Gustavo Amoros]

Hi Mike

Thank you for your comments. 

I have participated in more than 200 or perhaps 300 software projects in the last 40 years and in my free time I combine technologies and hardware from different eras, as in this case. 

An additional difficulty was that neither computer uses ASCII, in the case of the Commodore it uses PETSCII and the Spectrum has its own character set.

regards

[pzi123]

Gustavo, congrats on your sense of humor!

[Gustavo Amoros]

Hello pzi123

It's a pleasure to brighten your day!

regards.

[larstr]

Trying to upvote this posting, but can't find that option in these new communities.

Lars

[Gustavo Amoros]

Thanks Lars

regards,

Gustavo.

.

[Gustavo Amoros]

Coming soon to Proxmox

regards.