To think that we were able to get multiple users running off of a CPU that only had 64K of Ram!
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.
That's not an official HP site- however, it is a good one.
I know the guy who runs it.
To think that we were able to get multiple users running off of a CPU that only had 64K of Ram!
My VMS Hobbyist system at home has more processor power (dare I say VUPS?), more memory and more disk space than the VAX 4000/700A I once ran that supported 200 some-odd users in three cities.
George what hardware are you running on?
I'd like to get VMS runing at home.
I worked at DEC 1980 - 1992
Hey I thought VMS Systems were outlawed in NC.
DS10L, Personal Workstation 433au.
Got some old VAXstation 3100s in the garage, but I haven't done anything much with them since I got the Alphas.
HINT: Personal Workstations are often overlooked on eBay as they don't have the name VAX or Alpha in them.
Great hint:
thanks for the reply.
I agree with the general notion that there's no point in migration for migration's sake alone. I'm no fan of the "bleeding edge" myself.
But generally peoples needs (or at least their wants) change over time - and its ultimately that which forces the change in software and hardware. That, plus changes in periperhal hardware etc.
Excellent points there Mark.
So it appears there is still a great VMS core out in the real world, and business (managers) that know what important for the business will protect the core. THese MBA types can't manage crap only there greed (dot bomb)
bookmark bump
The agency I worked for, got rid of all their Wangs by the late 80's or early 90's. I had been very comfortable working with the Wang programs, and found Microsoft more difficult and complicated.
I used to say: "A day in the computer room is a cold day without sunshine."
Had one of those commit suicide on a DEC 8810 running Ultrix. It was, of course, the boot disk. This was absolutely the worst case senerio for me, as it was at the beginning of my time with Unix. First thing I did was slave the console printer on to record everything I did, then opened the man pages and start digging while I waited for DEC to deliver the drive (which ended up having to be flown to Dallas from somewhere out in California I believe). When the drive was installed, I ended up reinstalling Ultrix from 8" floppies. That took forever + 1 Day. The fine person who'd originally partitioned the disk had used a really funky partitioning scheme that I ended up having to locate on old printouts and calculate all the offsets by hand. I missed my daughters' second Halloween during the 36 hours it took me to get that computer back up and reloaded.
End the end though, I was able to create a document from that console log that could be used to recreate the system from scratch. It was so pretty it could be safely handed to the janitor while you went to get some sleep while he did the work.
WOW... bid is $69.00 buy it for $100!!!
Digital Alpha PWS 433au 433mhz 64MB 4GB Personal Workstation
433mhz Alpha RISC CPU
128MB Memory
4GB HArd Drive
Comes with CD and Floppy
COMES WITH USB PORTS
tested with a graphics card, shows Graphic bios then into SRM screen
THIS ITEM WILL NOT COME WITH GRAPHICS CARD
Workstation is in Serial Terminal console mode you will need to hook a terminal up to com port one and once you're in, set console = graphics, power cycle and SRM should show up on monitor.
Item is in good condition minor usage.
64 MB isn't much, though.
You can put up to 1 GB of RAM in it if you're running VMS on it. Tru64 or NT, 1.5 GB.
Assuming you get it, send me a real email address and I'll send you the documentation for it as well as a reseller I know who not only has good prices but guarantees everything he sells for 12 months.
damn this is tempting...
You forgot "...it is the creed of slaves" in your Wm. Penn tagline.
:)
By the way, are you talking about VMS on IA-64, or IA-64 in general?
If it's VMS on IA-64, which Integrity system are you talking about, a single-processor RX1???, or the 16-processor Superdome, or something in between?
And what do you mean by IO performance? Do you mean the throughput of the IO host bridge? IO on these systems is at least PCI-X 133, and PCI Express systems are scheduled for release this year. If you mean devices, are you talking SCSI, or NI or one of the subsets of those technologies?
I know more than a little bit about VMS, having done more than a little work on the VMS IO subsystem for Alpha and IA-64.
Good to see that there are still a lot of VMS fans around.
We're still here, and we don't plan on going away soon.
Send me an email address via Freepmail, and I'll send you some stuff.
2. IA-64 In general
3. End to end throughput for the price/performance curve nothing current can outperform VMS on Alpha. I have seen the benchmarks and know that supposedly ia-64 will compete with alpha but my real world trials 4way RX vs 4 Way es4x the es4x mopped up on a realtime process control app
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