Supposedly Dead Operating Systems : Digital's VMS Just Keeps Going and Going and Going...

Mass High Tech ( Journal of New England Technology) ^ | Keith Parent and Beth Bumbarger

[VadeRetro]

Used it for a long time and loved it. You don't see it in the want ads anymore.

[SirLinksalot]

Here is the answer to the question ....

How much longer will OpenVMS remain viable?

http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/0,10801,97032,00.html

"Our intention is to keep on using VMS until doomsday, as long as it keeps innovating and providing the highest standards in the IT world," says Sanchez Reina ( Manager of Sony Corp's Barcelona Center for Distribution (BCD) in Spain ). "We have no plans to migrate to VMS on Itanium, at least for now."

That seems to be the consensus among IT shops: Stay on Alpha, milk it for all it's worth, and keep a close eye on developments in the VMS/Integrity server space.

Like BCD and many other users, Einstein Healthcare has no immediate plans to migrate. Stenz says he has a four-year lease on Alpha hardware and is unlikely to change during that period.

"We are going to adopt a wait-and-see approach to developments on Itanium and VMS," he says.

Meanwhile, HP has had OpenVMS Version 8.1 in field testing on Itanium for many months. At the recent HP World Conference, it released Version 8.2 for testing. The company expects the first shipments of OpenVMS/Integrity servers either late this year or early next year.

Few anticipate significant problems in the system or in porting applications from Alpha to Itanium.

"The OpenVMS APIs are so correct architecturally that the operating system has not required substantial change since its original design in 1977," says Bob Gezelter, a software consultant in New York who has tested the new system. "OpenVMS on Integrity is a case of seamlessly assimilating a new processor, not using a high-tech shoehorn to force an old architecture into an ill-fitting shoe."

XDelta's Butcher has also tested Itanium/VMS. Other than needing some time to figure out the console interface, he says he found that VMS seemed to run and behave just as it always does.

Butcher does, however, express some reservations. "Performance might be an issue at the moment," he says. "The big Alphas probably outperform the larger Itanium boxes, but that will change with time."

Few Alpha users are in a hurry to make the switch.

"After seeing where the market and technology direction is heading, we may adjust our direction after the third year of our lease," says Einstein Healthcare's Stenz. "Depending on how things play out on Itanium 64 and VMS, we could very well then migrate to that architecture or extend/augment our ES47."

[George Smiley]

Good article, but it's over a year old.

The HP OpenVMS roadmap I posted was updated in December 2005.

8.1, by the way ended up being just a trial release; 8.2 ended up being the real McCoy.

Here's a link to the OpenVMS Operating System and Operating Environments Support Chart

It gives you release dates, support and prior version support dates, and a host of other information.

[George Smiley]

Notice that if you're willing to pay for Prior Version Support, they're supporting some versions of the OS that are 15 years old.

Anybody else doing that with their OS?

[Chode]

an oldie but goodie...

CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C HOAX
UNIXWORLDWEEKLY 4/1 p.1
In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating system and C programming language created by them is an elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for over 20 years. Speaking at the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the following:

"In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their (Bell Labs) work with the GE/Honeywell/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth's ETH labs in Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished reading Bored of the Rings, a hilarious Harvard Lampoon parody of the great Tolkein Lord of the Rings trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called 'A'. When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C, becoming the first programming language named after a Sesame Street character. We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:

for(;P("\n"),R-;P("|"))for(e=C;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);

To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T and other US corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It has taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even marginally useful applications using this 1960's technological parody, but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the general Unix and C programmer. In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have been working exclusively in Object Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past few years and feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly bad programming that have resulted from our silly prank so long ago."

Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, Bull (formerly Honewell), and DEC have refused comment at this time. Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools, including the popular Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++, stated they had suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhance their Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C. An IBM spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a hastily convened news conference concerning the fate of the RS-6000, stating 'a stable VM will be available Real Soon Now'. In a cryptic statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that P. T. Barnum was correct.

[George Smiley]

The most cryptic language that I've ever seen is APL.

[Chode]

funny how languages come and go but the core of my old FORTRAN77 programs from back in the 80's are still running...

[George Smiley]

What version of VMS did you compile them on?

And what version are you running them on now?

[Chode]

what ever was running in 85-88, i really don't remember anymore. they are all process control programs running glass melter's and their associated peripherals making TV panels and funnels in China and Russia.

they were all running on MicroVAX's and PDP 11/80's running RSX-11M being fed data by a couple dozen DYS50's and banks of Analog to Analog(AO20's iirc), Analog to Digital and Digital to Digital I/O cards.

tell you the truth, i tried to flush those memories after that as even in the 80's both places were still considered hardship positions and with good reason. since then all i've worked on are PC's. from what i've heard they have had maintence programming done/recompiled for newer computers but the core code of them was still intact in 1995 when i left as the processes haven't changed.

with lease lines, it was kinda cool looking at at a process running in China from NY. but that was a lifetime ago... 8^)

[George Smiley]

I once worked in a place where their backup system involved the use of satellite links.

Character cell input on a VT terminal went from the VT up to the satellite, down to the big VMScluster, back up to the satellite and down to the VT.

ONE........CHARACTER........AT........A........TIME.

It was either awful or amazing, depending on your point of view.

[Chode]

and i thought 300baud was bad... 8^)

[George Smiley]

It's Russian for: "VAX - when you care enough to steal the very best "

Story behind this at The Silicon Zoo

[Chode]

now THAT is funny... some place i've got a picture of four VAX chips on a board the military was using(F-117 comes to mind) with two voting on input and the third only coming on if there was a tie, the forth was a spare in case one of the other three failed.

[George Smiley]

The E8 JSTARS (Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System) has a cluster of twenty ES40s on it...Now that's some serious airborne computing power.

JSTARS does for the ground what AWACS does for the air, in case you're wondering.

[Chode]

yup... i know what the E8 is. i wonder if they use ducted outside air to cool them down instead of AC???

[George Smiley]

we had HSC failures, HDD crashes, DECservers die, and a DELNI blew up in a lightning storm one night.

Ha! When an RA81 disk had a head crash, you got aural confirmation of the event.

[George Smiley]

my post #59 linked to another thread where I ranted- in the middle of the rant there's a link to an article about the team that wrote the software for the space shuttle.

Not 100% bug-free but about as close as you can get.

The multiple system checking part sounds real similar to what you describe.

[Chode]

i have an RA81 disk platter on my wall as we speak... with the beautiful circle where the head touched the disk.

seamed like everybody had one on their cube wall at one time or another. 8^)

[Chode]

i remember that too but don't remember which came first.
also one time there was only an 85% confidence level in some triple backup system, and only a crit three system at that, NASA and the crew were all OK with it but the CPU vote was no... they had to REprogram to the 85% as a Go before they could launch.

[George Smiley]

Which ones had the bad glue problem? RL02?

I've long since forgotten, and it was before my time, anyway.