The Alpha chip is no longer manufactured (IMHO: Alphacide committed by COMPAQ to help it get bought by HP), but HP is continuing to release new versions of VMS for Alpha that has most of the functionality of the Integrity release: a common 64 bit code base is used, which was substantially different from the 32 bit code for VAX. Differences between Alpha and Integrity are that some hardware and software is not availabe for VMS Alpha systems: Serial SCSI comes to mind, and Intel's Itainium port of Sun's HotSpot JVM.
Version 8.4 of OpenVMS for Integrity and Alpha is entering beta (field test) for prodution release early next year.
h21007.www2.hp.com/portal/site/dspp/menuitem.863c3e4cbcdc3f3515b49c108973a801/?ciid=66a2aea9e2f73210VgnVCM100000a360ea10RCRD
To be sure, this is about a year late, and HP has laid off most of the experienced team (including some original developers from the 1970's) moving development to India (where DEC has started development teams decades ago), so it's not as if this is HP's lead investment. I've met some of the Indian developers, and they seemed intelligent, interested in promoting VMS, and willing to learn new and unique skills specific to VMS (i.e. crash dump analysis).
VAX/VMS is still at version 7.3, and will probably stay there, although patches are still being released.
There is a free licensing program for non-commercial use for any VAX, Alpha, or Integrity system, including emulators (SIMH is free and supports VAX).
www.openvmshobbyist.com
Born and raised in California, earthquakes tend to be boring:
Magnitude 3.x is what the news programs talk about in between the weather and highway traffic.
4.x tends to be somebody says something fell over.
5.x is when you start to notice...
Loma Prieta was 6.9 and the epicenter about 60 miles from my home, about the same distance to the houses that collapsed and burned in San Francisco. It's not the distance but the local ground conditions that made the difference: the only thing that happened at my house was an empty soda can fell over. In the Marina District, the landfill (from the 1906 earthquake) turned to jello, something like that happened in Oakland to the freeway, and my house on a natural slope was fine.
Besides, there is no "if" about a coming large quake, only "when", and to a lesser extent where: most likely the northern end on the Hayward fault. Santa Rosa would be the San Andreas fault.
For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!