VMS...WNT
Posted on 01/10/2006 10:17:04 AM PST by SirLinksalot
"Then the hardware wore out."
Good point.
And anyway, how many businesses nowadays don't want any changes to their apps or system for periods of years?
Of course I guess VMS users might not, since their nothing new to put on them anyway.
There are still PDP-11's working somewhere..........
Regards,Br> GtG
yep. nearly 40 3.5 inch micro disks. it would integrate with anything. I used it years and years ago to create a data-mining system.
Memories, I wrote apps using Fortran. Started on an IBM 1130. Remember those ?
I have a meeting in a week about converting some of our Open/VMS Alpha systems to an Itanium server. SHould be interesting...
Thank God I no longer have to use it.
I have nightmares about Pathworks to this very day.
and if you setup file shares instead of disk shares, you could set protections from the server side a lot more granularly and reliably using ACL's than people thought.
A VAX had to be tpretty badly beat up if I couldn't coax it into life.
we had a DEC training course taught on-site a while back. they had lent me a VAX4000-60 desktop VAX to play with, which I promptly claimed as me own. Well, they reclaimed it for the course, but I had rendered it unbootable - unless you knew what I had changed. it eventually was returned to me (hee hee!)
VMS...WNT
"My company has made VMS operating systems it's current standard for process control."
Would this be in the petroleum industry?
Hardly, it was the easiest assembly I've written. It was like a real programming language.
pathworks wasn't too bad for a DOS network stack. I'd seen a lot worse.
I learned Ultrix (unix) on a DEC system. Later I learned VMS. I loved DEC systems. I thought they were great. though my real expertise is on the IBM AS/400.
That is coming here, as we have a few programmers that have been making noise about moving to Linux or Unix... We'll see...
Was a VAX operator for a bit in the late 80's. It was not as "operator friendly" as the IBM mainframe systems, but it was a viable (i.e. relatively inexpensive) alternative for writing and testing applications (we used it mostly for bond and currency modelling applications).
On the other hand, getting any kind of support for hardware problems was a bitch. We'd very often lose half a day of operating time waiting for a tech to come out to fix a tape drive, for example. Perhaps that was simply a matter of geography (Staten Island, NY may be part of NYC, but it's rather difficult to get to).
Then again, it wasn't as bad as the Hitatchi system we used for international e-mail and fax. That had to be serviced by techs flown in from Japan (at that time there were no Hitatchi techs in the US, and besides, everything was in Japanese).
Eventualy, the VAX found itself replaced by an IBM AS/400. It was all a matter of service: we had dedicated on-site IBM techs, and it made no sense to wait for Digital techs to make their way from Princeton or Manhattan.
Still, they were perfectly good systems.
Rumor has it they made me code PL1 (and/or COBOL) in College, I think it was on a VAX. Good thing I was drunk all the time, or I would probably still have nightmares to this day! :)
The best OS ever, with the best set of tools, editors, and a shell scripting language DCL, capable of direct calls to the OS (i.e. the lexical functions.) Try that with EUNUCHS! I once programmed my own editor with VAXTPU. Piece'a cake. Clustering? Early 1980s, now being "discovered" in the world of EUNUCHS. I miss VMS every day as I pull my hair trying to get anything useful out of Solaris, shell, and the horrible Perl language.
And as for the hardware miracles of the Alpha architecture, you can find some of its magic in AMD's Opteron processors. They inherited much of the insanely fast bus architecture and 64-bit goodness of the Alpha.
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