The SimH emulator has long been able to run OpenVMS VAX.

There are probably free Alpha emulators by now, but the VAX version has been running on PCs for a long, long time, and it's what people know.

http://simh.trailing-edge.com/

For open-source Alpha emulation, there is AXPbox, which is a fork of the somewhat ancient es40, with some new fixes. It even runs on m1 macs now.

DEC would have been profoundly wise if they had recognized and adopted ARM, porting VMS to it.

Maybe Cutler would have stayed in that early fait-accomplis. They also never would have spent the money on Alpha, or wasted time selling MIPS workstations.

One thing is that there is a much larger array of interesting old software for the VAX rather than Alpha. The same will be true for Alpa compared with x86, but at least it will be easier to run more modern software on x86.

(I own both VAX and Alpha hardware and run VMS on both)

> (I own both VAX and Alpha hardware and run VMS on both)

Lucky you!