the operative words i used were Attempted and Imitation... 8^)
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 pretty much the size of it, okay.
I ran a PDP 11/70.
After years of running 360's and 370's with a variety of OS's.
It was like the MAC vs. PC's. Everything on the PDP was intuitive, and the computer did the work, not you.
The text editor (EDT) was so far above and beyond editors on IBM mainframes it was like being given a gift (when writing programs). EDT was, in many ways, far superior to any of today's WORD processing programs.
DEC's manuals were truly manuals made to learn from.
IBM's manuals are made to obfuscate and cause phone calls to highly paid consultants.
The DEC's operated in byte mode, instead of block mode for terminal communications, and you could not move the cursor to a position on the screen that was not a valid data entry position. On the IBM, you can, and if you hit enter, it locks the screen. Why allow the cursor in non data areas ?
What my experience has taught me is that there are good computers and popular computers. There are good programmers, and there are straight line coders.
Most programmers have no idea how a computer really operates, and therefore usually make only passable programmers.
Most people 'love' IBM and various softwares, because it's all they've ever used. Only those who have used better know better.
One of the CE's told me an interesting story. I repeat this because of the current state of the art in VOICE RENDERING available for PC users.
I had both PC's and MAC's for my use and adminstrated the setup/installation/training for all employees where I worked.
The MAC had a program that would READ any type text file. Email, word processing, didn't matter.
AND IT WAS PRETTY GOOD AT IT.
But, what surprised me was that the DEC CE, when I showed him this, told me that when I call in for service I was not talking to a human. I was talking to a VAX.
The VOICE program on the MAC was good, beyond today's PC programs, but not anywhere near as good as the VAX voice I talked to. I never had any idea it wasn't a real person until he told me.
The only sitting on the hill I remember is the one that was on one side of the football stadium. I never sat back there...not like there was much reason to go to the football games in the mid-'80s anyhow, except to watch Charles Haley play.
}:-)4
A bit slow but I know of 2 RS Commodore 64s still plugging along.
<<<<
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.
>>>>
I think HP might have made a mistake staking the future of VMS on the ITANIUM instead of Opteron...
Ah yeah, good ol' EDT, my main editor in college. Simple, straightforward, not hard to learn.
And then came EVE. EVE was a hell of an editor. I used it when most of my classmates were still on EDT, because EVE was a lot more powerful and flexible if you were willing to put in the time to learn it (and I had a lot of boring downtime on the help desk). I liked using EVE.
Then after a few years on IBMs with TSO/ISPF, I ended up in a Unix shop...using vi. I'm still scarred for life.
}:-)4
I can't run Prairie Dog Hunter on my XP box...I sure do miss that game...
As the old axiom said, "Nobody was ever fired for buying IBM."............
Steve L
May 21 2004, 12:49 pm show options
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
From: Steve L - Find messages by this author
Date: Fri, 21 May 2004 13:49:19 -0400
Local: Fri, May 21 2004 12:49 pm
Subject: Re: Dave Cutler and VMS
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On Fri, 21 May 2004 02:06:23 GMT, JF M wrote:
>Steve L wrote:
>> Cutler left VMS in 1980 before version 2.0 was released, and was not further
>> involved with the VMS OS development.
>That article alludes to the fact that Cutler left Digital at VMS 5.0, making
>it look to the microsoft weenies that Cutler was still involved with VMS.
I know. There seems to be a strong tendency to embellish Cutler's involvement with VMS as we know it today. His involvement with VAXELN is also missing from most of the chronologies I have read. If one looks at the original high-level design of NT, with separate subsystems and message-passing, it is almost a carbon-copy of VAXELN. As with VAXELN (and VAX PL/I and VAX C), it took several years and lots of engineers to actually make NT work, with the "elegance" of the separate subsystems replaced by the practicality of more tightly-coupled code.
Cutler was very heavily involved in the kernel design for VMS 1.0, though a lot of it looked like RSX-11D (no surprise.) He kept the role of project manager through 1979 and perhaps partly into 1980, and then left to do PL/I.
My personal view is that Cutler does not deserve all the credit he is given for VMS. I consider the contributions of visionaries such as Tom Hastings, Dick Hustvedt, Peter Conklin and others to be of at least equal, if not greater importance. They're the ones who kept an eye on the future and made sure that VMS had the architectural foundation it needed to succed in the long term. Otherwise, it would be just a 32-bit RSX. Consider the "common language environment", something pretty much unheard of back in 1977 (or since then, for that matter.) VMS is one of the few significant operating systems where there is a (mostly) level playing field for programming languages, and common calling conventions. Tom Hastings deserves most of the credit for that.
I don't want to minimize Cutler's contributions - they were significant. But I don't feel he quite deserves the "Father of VMS" label that is so often applied to him.
Steve
DECtalk.
That's not an accident. C was intended to a portable assembly language and was created by people who started life writing assembler on PDP8/11 computers. I used an early cut of UNIX written in assembler for the COSMOS support system. It was called "COSNIX". A real time variant of that COSNIX was created for automatic call distributors. It was called MERT. Dennis Ritchie's invention of C turned out to be very useful across a broad range of assemblers and CPU architectures.
From what I've been able to gather, the Itanic architecture places all the performance work on the compiler, and so far it has proven extremely difficult to create compilers that generate the speed.
Mass-market forces continue to propel the humble lil' 8088 architecture and its offspring far beyond what their technical capabilities would ever have predicted. :-) Nearly every other CPU architecture is better; none have been able to beat it in the marketplace.
i still believe it was an attempted immitation of VMS reguardless of who created VMS... even the name was a kind of in "Joke" like HAL was to IBM. the letters preceding IBM are HAL... WNT are the letters following VMS. coincidence??? 8^)
But again, NT doesn't have 96 nodes in a [shared-everything] cluster and 800KM between nodes.
I wake up every morning and thank God that I don't support Windows systems for a living.
Again, guys, there's a hobbyist program- join ENCOMPASS (associate memberships are free), grab some hardware off of eBay, get hobbyist licenses (also free) and surf without worrying about viruses.
the operative words i used were Attempted and Imitation... 8^)
NASA facilities everywhere. The launch control center at Kennedy.
There are even PDP-8s in use on scavenged parts.
My company still supports and writes Client software for Open/VMS systems. Many are still in use at the enterprise level.
I keep a PDP-8 card on my shelf at home to remember the good old days. We transitioned from PDP-8 to PDP-11 when I worked at Signetics.
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