Your kidding me!! I thought I was the only one around that knew anything about IRIS. I used to be a Point 4 reseller and sold a lot of Mark 5's Mark III's and Mark II's.
Man, those where the days!!
Posted on 01/10/2006 10:17:04 AM PST by SirLinksalot
Digital’s 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 region’s computer industry in the halcyon days of the mid-to-late 1980s participated in one of the great entrepreneurial periods of our nation’s 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 today’s 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 Digital’s 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 today’s 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 it’s 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 Digital’s 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.
got me there... ???
On the other hand, when you've got rock solid hardware and software, why migrate away from it, especially when you need to ensure 100% uptime.
A client of mine did ALL of their real-time financial transactions on a VMS cluster. They were a major clearing house, and downtime would have cost them in the hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour!
Another client, a manufacturer, uses it for their production lines. They're a JIT (Just In Time) supplier for an auto manufacturer, and they've got a fixed amount of time to supply the auto factory with the components ordered, othetwise, it causes the auto plant's production line to shut down. If they're late, they get "fined" a huge amount of money, for every piece that's late.
Mark
A Cutler-ism?
Mark
What are you talking about? I've got an AMD running MS-DOS 3.30 running on one!
Mark
it was kind of an in joke at the time. like HAL in 2001 was to IBM, HAL being the letters preceding IBM, VMS are the letters right after WNT. coincidence...??? 8^)
If you liked EDT and EVE, you might enjoy giving emacs a try. Think of the esc key as a sort of an ersatz Gold key (rather than PF1. ;-)
Or if you really want to use the EDT keybinds, you can have emacs also provide EDT/TPU keybindings (you may have to find a copy of the emacs lisp file "edt-mapper.el", but a lot of unix machines have it installed.)
On this RedHat 4.2 box, all I have to do is ESC x edt-emulation-on RET inside of emacs to set-up EDT key bindings.
my bad... make that WNT right after VMS.
You could make it work...but good luck running anything resembling an application afterwards.
*shudder*
I remember those days!
device=dxma0mod.sys
device=dxmc0mod.sys
(need NetBIOS?)
device=dxmt0mod.sys
Shared folders on a System 38 or AS-400?
Add in IPX/SPX and IP protocol stacks, and you're hosed if you wanted to actually do anything useful on your PC.
Unless you were using MS or PC DOS 6.0 and upper memory management (preferably with QEMM from Quarterdesk - I've still got a copy of that in my basement!) Word Perfect for DOS didn't have enough RAM to run...
Those were the days!
Mark
Vi is your friend! Bill Joy writes good code! I use a win32 version on my computers!
Actually, I LOVE vi. I progressed from key punch, to XEDIT, to vi.
Mark
Your kidding me!! I thought I was the only one around that knew anything about IRIS. I used to be a Point 4 reseller and sold a lot of Mark 5's Mark III's and Mark II's.
Man, those where the days!!
I was a DEC Field Engineer for 14 years. Worked on everything from PDP15 to VAX 8750. I still miss VMS. I once spent four weeks in Bedford, MA in January going thru VMS Internals and Data Structures. It was a great time. I now support Microbloat products and am still waiting for them to produce an enterprise wide OS.
A buddy of mine in college was a physics major, and he did quite a bit of APL programming. I don't think that he ever wrote a program in APL that was longer than 5 lines.
Mark
Learned Fortran on VAX 11/780, migrated code to Cray's.
Ahh, those were the days :-) :-) :-)
Cheers!
Due to this and other factors, a UNIX programmer is, in my estimate, about a third as productive as a VMS programmer. For scripting, I'll take DCL over Perl and its derivatives any day.
I used a WANG computer at work in the early to late 80's, and still regret its demise.
I sold and programmed every one of those also DG NOVA and the Bitronix Box. The Point was a really good box and fast. Windows and P/Cs killed them off.
I have removed his name.
) wrote in message news:<.google.com>...
> > >
> > > listen Andrew, VMS security mup kits are rarely issued, and
> > > don't confuse ucx flaws with VMS os and kernel flaws ...
> >
> >
> > Aah, that old chestnut. Whenever you discuss security with VMS guys
> > they always trot it out. Does that mean we can take your figure of
> > 1000+ solaris holes and cross off anything not in the kernel ? :)
>
Yes, but first redesign and rewrite your Unix to cleanly categorize and separate Kernel Mode from Supervisor Mode and from User Mode. Three modes are a minimum for a correct ring protection system. The use of three or more rings happens to be a fully patented methodology by OpenVMS Engineering. OpenVMS has four. OpenVMS also has 40 groups of higher mode functionality classified as requiring special named privileges.
And, then...
allow access to higher mode services only through a DESCRIPTOR-based calling standard which rules out "by design" the primary cause of security holes - buffer-overflows. The secure Calling Standard is a central design theme in OpenVMS.
rewrite and install your TCP/IP stack so that it doesn't live in or directly access kernel mode services except through the calling standard.
If the previous condition was met, your TCP/IP stack probably won't work in Supervisor Mode or User Mode without these changes. This is the reason why most security holes for which OpenVMS is affected do not in fact lead to a security vulnerability. In this sense I agree with Andrew. Security vulnerability listings are inaccurate for OpenVMS. Because they do not correctly differentiate whether only a user-mode process can be affected or a higher mode, and whether a higher privilege can be attained.
A correct listing must rate the severity of the security hole. In OpenVMS the severity is usually lower (or meaningless) in comparison to other operating systems.
design privilege assignments to be attached to a mode. If a program installed in a higher mode breaks out to a user-mode prompt, all privileges assigned during the program run must be automatically lost. This prevents program privilege tailgating.
OpenVMS Hackers (yes they do exist, an admirably persistent if unsuccessful lot) have recently discovered this functionality in OpenVMS, in which they intentionally installed an application with privileges and with a buffer overflow leading to a DCL prompt. Their experiment failed.
This OpenVMS "knockdown" functionality can also be extended to disable the privilege of receiving a DCL Prompt when breaking out of a program or DCL procedure, just by assigning the CAPTIVE and RESTRICT flags to user accounts.
design your Unix to provide only strictly separated (and from overflow controlled) user and system stacks to prevent stack crashing leading to access to higher mode functions.
Let's also not forget a redesign of the internal logon mechanism to be carried out by one program/process first created at user request and has complete responsibility for the entire login sequence.
These are only a few of the unique, patented design decisions in OpenVMS resulting in a world-beating matrix of Functionality, Reliability, Availability, Security, Stability, and Scalability (RT, APMP, SMP and Cluster).
It's an OS that was "Designed" first by four competing teams of experts, and then the best results of these competing design teams merged into a final design team. They knew of the older Unix, MVS and Multics designs, and naturally they innovated and improved on them for the Enterprise OS problem space.
When you are done making these elementary design changes to Unix (many of which were intentionally excluded or ignored by the Unix designers in 1969 - Multics already had early forms of many of them) you will find most of the commercial products on the Unix market will no longer function correctly on your New-Unix, and will also require a redesign, and then a rewrite.
But at least you will finally have an OS and TCP/IP stack which "begins" to technically compare with OpenVMS within the frame of security.
And you'll have a product which pays royalties to OpenVMS Engineering.
Each OS has its strengths and weaknesses in design and implementation which will have a different evaluation depending on the problem space it will be applied to, and depending on the design goals of the designers. For the general Enterprise OS problem space, I believe OpenVMS Engineering has most consistently made the best decisions in design and implemented them with an admirably consistent high quality and methodology.
OpenVMS enthusiasts can righteously bemoan that the Computer Science Profession (Informatics) have failed to recognize and teach their students the sophisticated mechanisms and high principles found in OpenVMS, preferring instead to favoritize the minimalistic asthetics of Unix, or the marketing level sophistication in OS selection. This is a real loss for enterprise efficiency (money), mission-critical system stability (lives), and the computer science profession (maturity as a science). A more balanced and impartial framework of scientific thought is needed. Computer Science needs some independence from commercial and marketing interests to even discover the value of many existing designs, technologies and ideas. The last major papers over OS design were written over 10 years ago, but their work is far from complete.
Critics of OpenVMS should first study and compare its internals (Professional OS comparisons and choices should not be reduced to an application layer beauty contest) with an open mind concerning OS design paradigms, system operations principles and reliability methodologies.
After recovering from the shock, they will likely no longer be as critical.
Cheers!
--------------
IBM Business Services - ---------, -----------
Semi-Nonstandard Disclaimer:
Any non-official claims concerning my semi-official opinions are hereby officially disclaimed.
i.e. I said it, not my employer. (and no I didn't steal this one from Yogi Berra)
I welcome rebuttal, however a lack of response on my part only indicates a lack discretionary time to indulge in discussions peripheral to my employment activities.
Again, this isn't VMS Engineerign talking- it's from a guy with a competitor.
You can go back three months later and have to parse it out, character by character, to figure out what the hell you were doing.
and some of the really good ones you could hear from across the data center.
When did your wang die?
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