VMS...WNT
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.
"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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