emacs...
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.
Ahhh, please. EDT was the text editor of n00bs and users. LSE was the programmers text editor. LSE would practically debug your code as you went along.
You seriously don't believe EDT is better in any way to Word, do you? If this were so, Microsoft wouldn't be where it is today and WordPerfect or WordStar would still be used by people who have never heard of Novell. Remember 20/20, or should I call it the inspiration for Excel?
If anyone wonders why Security set-up on Windows networks appears redundant or contradictory, it's because they hired all the DEC people to write it.
Cut my teeth on the IBM 1130. My processor list is as long as an orangutan's arm.
emacs...
Folks,
I'm sure the majority of your applications that run on OpenVMS are based on the Alpha architecture. If this article tells us anything, it is this -- HP is NO LONGER GOING TO SUPPORT THE ALPHA PLATFORM in a few years.
For those with applications that run on the VMS thinking about their future, it looks like we have about 5 to 6 years to rethink if we want to run on an ITANIUM based VMS platform...( what HP calls the INTEGRITY PLATOFORM) or maybe to upgrade ( I don't think it is the right word, so lets use the word -- MOVE ) to a different Operating System platform altogether ??
Hard choices. Also hard to determine how much longer VMS will live ....I don't know if there are any new installations out there at all.
I have fond memories of VAX/VMS systems. We had a campus VAX in high school in 1991, where I sent my first email, read my first bulletin board message, and downloaded my first guitar tab from the OLGA. I was so proud when I figured out how to change my default prompt...
In fact, I did a good chunk of the analysis of my dissertation research, including most of the plots, on a VMS (DEC/Alpha 400 MHz), and I graduated in 2002. Granted, I was the only one in the department (besides my advisor) using a VMS, but that just goes to show there are a few users out there.
DON'T MAKE ME COME DOWN THERE!
The last sales of the Alpha family will occur in 2006.
The VMS rule of thumb is that a system will be supported for at least five years after its last sale date.
Hardware support in all likelihood will continue for a long time after that.
Hardware support is still around for most MicroVAXes, VAXstations and most of the VAX family!
For those who are interested in seeing what HP's plans are for the future of VMS, here is a link to HP's OpenVMS Roadmap which is the publicly available plan (Links at the bottom of the page have presentation source)
For those with applications that run on the VMS thinking about their future, it looks like we have about 5 to 6 years to rethink if we want to run on an ITANIUM based VMS platform...( what HP calls the INTEGRITY PLATOFORM) or maybe to upgrade ( I don't think it is the right word, so lets use the word -- MOVE ) to a different Operating System platform altogether ??
Hard choices. Also hard to determine how much longer VMS will live ....I don't know if there are any new installations out there at all.
Bite your tongue for even THINKING that.
There are things I know that I can't say publicly.
VMS sales increased this year over last year.
The percentage of growth would, quite frankly surprise you. (It surprised me.)
A training vendor with whom I spoke said that this year they did more VMS training than in the last several years combined, and a good deal of this was at new sites.
9/11 opened a lot of corporate eyes about business continuity, disaster recovery and high availability computing.
Link to Success story about Commerzbank, located 100 yards from the WTC. Link to longer article in .pdf
There were several companies located *in* the WTC that ran OpenVMS and whose systems kept going thanks to the robustness of VMS clustering with systems located at remote sites.
Some years before 2001, Credit Lyonnais' data center in France BURNED DOWN, and they didn't lose any data.
The eternal monthly Microsoft patch cycle is opening corporate eyes as well.
Corporate IT departments have to test each month's patch releases with whatever their suite of software products is and then deploy the patches du jour.
If you've got more than fifty or so systems, by the time you manage to do that, another round of patches is released.
And that cycle becomes exteremely expensive in terms of down time and personnel expense, not to mention the burnout factor in the people who have to do all that stuff on nights and weekends.
I watched a major federal agency spend WEEKS and heaven knows how many thousands of man-hours eradicating a worm.
It's called Total Cost of Ownership, boys and girls.
And one plus that you haven't mentioned: OpenVMS running on Superdomes will allow you to have one system that runs multiple OS's simultaneously.
The main VMS page is located at http://www.hp.com/go/openvms
I don't work for HP, but I *am* a VMS bigot.
My program would take IOTRACE tapes as input, to detect the actual access patterns for each segment of each file, and then repositioned the files across the disk farm to enhance throughput based on the file and disk characteristics.
I called it IFARTUFART: Interactive File Analysis, Relocation and Tracing for the Ultimate in Faster Access and Response Times...
Ahhhh....those were the days!
LOL! I was THERE! I was walking near the Notre Dame, when a frenchman started yelling "Fume! Fume!" (phonic: FooMay!)
I follwed the smoke and came to the area where the building was in flames. Later found out there were some *reasons* for the fire...ahem.
Do tell- I've never heard about the "reasons".
We would have to take the mainframes down at night and there was always one or two users who wouldn't logoff. On the CDC mainframes you could sent a user a message with ":D" in it and they would get automatically logged off.
The CDC mainframes had a CPU that had no I/O capability but read/write memory (Seymour Cray designed them to run circles around everyone else). You had either 10 or 20 peripheral processors (PPs) that talked to the channels where the tape drives, printers, etc were managed. One PP was reserved for monitor and one for the console display driver. The rest were assigned as needed by the OS. I programmed the PPs.
Once I was working on a proposal and the Government asked my boss in a design review how I came up with the Lines of Code estimate for the PP driver. I told her, "Cause I already wrote it." She says, "I can't tell them that!" So she goes into this song and dance about "based on past experience..."
The assembly language on a CDC mainframe was 64 instructions (the first true RISK architecture). Taught myself when I was a computer operator back in '72.
Steel industry.
Thanks for the advice. I'll look into the ia-64 IO.
I'm hoping porting won't be a big issue, that's what the salesman says anyway....
George,
What browzer app are you using, Mozilla?
When we got the VAX in 87 we thought it was a godsend, up to that point we had been working on a SEL 32/55 and were still using MYLAR Tape to input the mission data into the SR-71.
The current VMS web browser is called HP Secure Web Browser; it's based on Mozilla M1.7.11.
Had a six-ton Liebert air conditioner in the corner.
And as a lights-out operation, nobody went in on weekends.
Because of that, you'd come in on Monday morning and it would be so cold in there that you'd expect to see frost on the walls.
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