Posted on 01/10/2006 10:17:04 AM PST by SirLinksalot
Digitals venerable VMS just keeps going and going and going....
01/09/2006
By Keith Parent and Beth Bumbarger
MASS HIGH TECH : JOURNAL OF NEW ENGLAND TECHNOLOGY
New Englanders old enough to have worked in the regions computer industry in the halcyon days of the mid-to-late 1980s participated in one of the great entrepreneurial periods of our nations history. Those were the days of the Massachusetts Miracle, when technology titans such as Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), Wang Laboratories, Data General and Prime Computer Inc. employed tens of thousands of high-tech professionals in what then Gov. Michael Dukakis described in a famous understatement as good jobs at good wages.
The Big Four as they were known, disappeared in the late 1990s. In the space of two years, Wang went bankrupt and was acquired by Getronics. Prime became Computervision Corp., which later was bought by Parametric Technology Corp. Data General was sold to EMC Corp., and Digital disappeared into Compaq Computer Corp., which shortly thereafter merged into Hewlett-Packard Co.
Thousands of minicomputer alumni in the region still work here, and we share some bittersweet memories of those years when New England ruled the roost. It is hard for todays New England high-tech workers to comprehend the scale of those companies. Yet a funny thing happened on their way to extinction. Their products lived on. The hardware and software they developed in the 1970s and 1980s is still being used by customers worldwide.
Take Digitals Virtual Memory System (VMS) operating system. VMS was released in 1977 to support the VAX 11/780, the first commercially available 32-bit computer in the world. The VAX/VMS system was wildly popular, and by 1982 Digital was second only to IBM Corp. in computer sales.
In 1992, Digital introduced the Alpha 64-bit computer and renamed its operating system Open/VMS. Its clustering capability which allows users to link many VAXes into a virtual mainframe is still considered state-of-the-art. Stories abound about the systems reliability; the most famous, perhaps, being how the Irish National Railroad ran its system for 17 years without a single reboot. Try to accomplish that on todays systems.
VAX, Alpha and Open/VMS are particularly prized in the financial, health care and telecommunications industries, where high availability is critical. No wonder more than 400,000 VAX and Alpha systems are used by 10 million people daily. All good things come to an end. While Open/VMS will probably survive for decades, the VAX and Alpha architectures will gradually be phased out by Hewlett-Packard, which wants customers to migrate to its newer Integrity servers. As HP removes its support for these products, the ecosystem of Digital spin-offs, most with fewer than 100 employees, will step to the fore and keep these venerable systems running. Whether its memory boards, storage controllers, or the most sophisticated software consulting services, New England really is the digital center of excellence.
New technology life cycles tend to be measured in months, not years. That may be true of consumer goods such as cell phones. But there are so many examples of robust, mission-critical systems in use today that are still supporting the financial, transportation, health care, telecommunications and energy infrastructure. We would not be the least bit surprised if Digitals systems outlive the people who created them.
Keith Parent is CEO of Court Square Data Group, an IT consulting firm in Springfield. Beth Bumbarger is CEO of Nemonix Engineering of Northborough, which provides VAX and AlphaServer upgrades, service and support.
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."
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.
Anybody else doing that with their OS?
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.
The most cryptic language that I've ever seen is APL.
And what version are you running them on now?
with lease lines, it was kinda cool looking at at a process running in China from NY. but that was a lifetime ago... 8^)
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.
and i thought 300baud was bad... 8^)
It's Russian for: "VAX - when you care enough to steal the very best "
Story behind this at The Silicon Zoo
JSTARS does for the ground what AWACS does for the air, in case you're wondering.
yup... i know what the E8 is. i wonder if they use ducted outside air to cool them down instead of AC???
Ha! When an RA81 disk had a head crash, you got aural confirmation of the event.
Not 100% bug-free but about as close as you can get.
The multiple system checking part sounds real similar to what you describe.
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^)
Which ones had the bad glue problem? RL02?
I've long since forgotten, and it was before my time, anyway.
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