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

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.

These MBA types

Ha!

I once was a direct report to a newly minted MBA who did not have Day One of real-world business experience.

I left work each day in what Scott Adams calls Must...Control...Screaming...Fist...Of...Death mode.

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.

Correct. This has more to do with the IA64 itself than with IO throughput at the host bridge or down-stream IO transactions.

It will take a little while yet for IA64 hardware to catch-up to Alpha, but it will catch-up and then surpass. The compilers have some room to grow, too. Compiler opitimization is always an issue with new processor technologies.

I did not get the opportunity to use LSE.

EDT was easy to learn.
The 10-key pad in conjunction with 'alt' activated over 30 commands. Your original file was always kept intact. You could have (on the DEC) as many 'versions' of file as you wanted.

My statement about it being better than WP today was meant to refer to the power and speed of it's commands.

I find nothing in WP softwares that let's you do a FIND AND REPLACE based on LOOKS LIKE. And only by creating macros can you perform multiple operations.

I use an IBM mainframe, and the editor on it sucks bigtime.

LSE rocked. It was a Language Sensitive Editor. So take EDT and then have it color to your code automatically, similar to how a lot of code editors operate today. It would use your file extenstion to determine the code language and would even build default code shells when you first created the empty code file.

It would highlight sentax errors in an alternate color. A true pleasure to work with back in the stone age of computing.

Thank you for the reply, have a great week.

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