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The article mentions SRI's Charon VAX. This is very expensive software that requires a USB dongle for licensing.

However, you can also run VAX VMS on a free i386 VAX emulator called SIMH. I don't seem to be able to get very good ethernet performance with SIMH. However, you can run NetBSD/VAX on it out of the box, and OpenBSD will run with a kernel patch. SIMH also has a PDP-11 emulator and includes images of the original UNIX V7 from AT&T (courtesy of SCaldera). SIMH is an interesting way to run both ancient and modern UNIXen without reformatting your PC.

You can also get free VMS licenses for SIMH/VAX. They must be renewed yearly.

Alpha VMS also supported a VAX binary emulator called VEST, which is mentioned in another post here. Support for VEST is dying, however (modern RDB releases have dropped it). The Charon VAX emulator also runs on Alpha VMS.

Grab yourself a DEC Alpha machine of some sort off eBay and head over to http://www.montagar.com/hobbyist/ to find out how to get an OpenVMS license for free.

Hmm, what's wrong with it? Why won't it run OpenVMS, Tru64, or NetBSD?

In addition to our WAN/LAN I also run a medium size phone switch (195 nodes / 16 IP Phones / 2 PRIs for switched access / 1 dedicated Long Distance T1). When you get to the corporate level you're buying a solution; not building one in house, because phones are essential to the day to day operation of the company. Period. I think generically when you say phone switch you're referring to everything telco past the demarc; switch T1s/PRIs, operate internal digital stations, provide analog lines, route calls, manage security, reporting/tracking/billing, Voicemail, Auto Attendants, Hunt Groups, Digital Faxing- the whole 7 layer enchilada. Few corporations are going to allow their IT departments to go the Slashdot way w/ so much on the line. A modern phone switch must reliably scale to thousands of nodes including IP devices, support Unified Messaging (receiving faxes & voice mails through PC), have reporting right out of the box, must be easy to use, and work on the first cut over. While the word 'easy' is certainly a very relative word- in my experience most geeks (a word of complimentary endearment in my vocabulary) can easily master telco while the reverse is not often true. Believe it or not, in the old days these were sometimes the roles of separate administrators / departments.

You're right that *nix is a perfect fit for all of this; remember Unix was invented at Bell Labs. The auxiliary applications are there; to support your phone switch you need to reliably record and report all activity across your switch for billing, acct. tracking, etc. I would guess that *nix runs the backbone.

If you'd like you can become a dealer for the company that claims to have 'the world's first Linux technology based voice processing' including Unified Messaging.

By the way I think that Bayonne is encompassed in the umbrella project of GNUComm; hopefully it's just a matter of time before someone finishes the Embedded Linux Phone Switch. As an incentive to anyone who develops and releases a free system: even used handsets cost big money for a particular phone switch; pick wisely 'cause you're most likely stuck with it for a little while. Caveat: you will most likely be pushed out of the market by softphones.

Since you're in the market and I just went through this myself contact me off list and I'll share my experience with Inter-Tel Technologies which is one of the fastest growing companies in the US (short version: no I don't work there and overall positive).

ACtually you're an idiot there has been a 64 bit version of windows since 1993, its called windows NT and it was jointly developed by DIGITAL and Microsoft for the Alpha processor. ALthough Microsoft no longer supports the Alpha processor there was an unreleased version of windows 2000 made for it. DIGITAL did make a 64 bit version of UNIX before NT came out, so yes you are infact right in some manner. But there was only a few year difference

1. you can get a VAX hardware emulator such as simh
2. Join Encompass (Assocaite - just enough to get the hobbyest licenses)
3. Get a VMS hobbiest license (details and some media)
4. Install VMS
5. Have fun...

I want a VMS system! That's what I'd like to get MY hands on an Alpha system for.

Licenses are available to members of DECUS, Encompass, or other affiliated Compaq User Group. Both Encompass Associate and Members are eligible. There should be a participating Chapter near you.

Use of the Licensed Computer is ONLY FOR NON-COMMERCIAL USES (e.g., home use). As such, you may not use the Licensed Computer for any business purposes whatsoever, e.g., to develop applications for resale, to do business accounting, etc.

If you are interested in learning about VMS, I suggest you check out the following: The VMS FAQ and VMS documentation site, which have a plethora of info. There is not much info on VMS available from source besides Compaq, online or off.

The best way to learn about VMS is to get a VMS system. You can get a VAX system on eBay very cheap (sub-$100) and you can get a complete VMS system software for free (see ). The VMS hobbyist page. There's also a VAX emulator which comes with VMS (Charon VAX).

The Unix texts which refer to Unix as a kludged system are "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Raymond, and "The Unix Philosophy" by Gancarz, both of which admit that Unix is a rapid-prototyping environment, and that design is not done when programming for the system. Projects like the Hurd and Linux make me yawn because they are just more implementations of Unix. What's the point? If you inist on cloning an existing system, at least clone something interesting!

The FreeVMS project is largely dead. I do not believe that it will be able to produce a free version of VMS.

However, there is the VMS Hobyyist Program, which permits free use of VMS (including most layered products including clustering, DECwindows, C compiler, development tools, DECnet, TCP/IP, etc., etc.) on an Alpha or VAX system. Also, VMS source code is available for a small charge (around $100) from Compaq. It is not open source, but the quality is demonstrably superior than most open source software, except perhaps for the GUI stuff.

Another odd thing is the vnunet.com article is the first I've heard of OpenVMS being in any danger since Compaq purchased DEC, and I keep up on OpenVMS. Simply put Compaq is smart enough to know they've got an excellent product there that they make a lot of money on. Somehow I have to question the reliablity of this information.

To bad they didn't mention anything about when OpenVMS V7.3 will be out. I'm perfectly happy running V7.2 on my cluster (even have VAX/VMS V5.5-2 on one VAX), but I really need TCPIP V5.1 as it fixes a problem that exists with previous versions of their TCP/IP implementation.

For people that have VAX or Alpha systems they can get a free Hobbyist Licenese for OpenVMS.

I'm sorry to hear about OS/2, it is an excellent product. I started running it with V1.3 shortly before I got my hands on Linux 0.12. For a while for me both OS's competed to be my OS of choice. However, the combination of Lotus Smartsuite for OS/2 and the release of Windows 95 drove me to the Mac. These days a merging of a G4 PowerMac frontend and an Alpha based OpenVMS cluster is my system of choice, with a nice fast x86 Linux box coming in a close second.

Zane

VMS: Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

VMS isn't dead, despite Gartner and the rest proselytizing that fate for the last 10 years. They've done the same thing to unix, until very recently.

VMS still has a large user base, but Compaq has seen fit to cut off their noses, keep prices through the stratosphere, and aim for the high end only, all the while selling off bits and pieces of technology to M$ as part of the 'Affinity' program. This was of course to woo NT development over to Alpha, but M$ as usual has found a way to make this useless to their 'partner' (delaying 64-bit NT on Alpha until Merced ships with 64-bit NT, denying any Alpha leadtime). Fortunately, Compaq has seen some of the light and pulled the plug, pulled their Digits off NT filesystem/clustering development, etc.

There are a number of organizations that will support VMS, though I bet you're more after commercial application support. There are still quite a few Apps available (even WordPerfect 7) but the market has declined into a lot of vertical applications (science, education, research, telecommunications, banking, utilities). Some of this is due to development cannibalization to port to NT, most of it is due to DEC and now Compaq treating VMS like it is a dirty word for the past 5 or 6 years.

Compaq is still a PC box pusher. They don't understand that they have an OS with incredible reliability (uptimes in the range of 13-15 years have been reported) and clustering that nothing else can touch (shared everything, over multiple transports, with automatic load balancing, cluster aliases, the ability to cluster machines 100's of miles apart, etc...)

There is still a community, despite the Q's attempts to munge DECUS into a new marketing vehicle for their desktop PC's (I get offers as a member of DECUS for steep discounts on PC's with NT installed...while what I want are steep discounts on Alpha boxes with VMS or Linux). Check out the VMSNET newsgroups or COMP.OS.VMS. Very active. DECUS has managed to get Compaq to issue a 'hobbyist' VMS license and a selection of layered products. Some commercial VMS vendors are participating to offer their products under the same license. Check out Montagar Software which distributes hobbyist licenses. You have to join DECUS (free).

The 'Open' in OpenVMS was a marketroid move when VMS fully supported POSIX (6.0?). IIRC VMS had full POSIX support before any commercial Unix did. It had nothing at all to do with the move to Alpha. It was just buzzword compliance when everything deployed had to be an 'open system'. There is no difference between VMS and OpenVMS, save for the POSIX layer. That has been removed in recent versions, as the standard VMS runtime libraries now support the POSIX API's as well.

Too bad it was before your time. When I was in college, VMS was *it*. VMS is younger than Unix, mind you, but they gave steep hardware and software discounts to colleges and phenomenal support. Now, so many useful things have been dropped from the CSLG (Campus Software License Agreement) that we plan on dropping the CSLG here next year. It is no longer worth it. Compaq's high-end blinders have lead them to sell off the layered products that made managing VMS clusters so sweet (PolyCenter Scheduler, Console Manager, Performance Analyzer, etc.) Most of these were sold to Computer Associates and now run on (and require) NT. Compaq's direction is loudly ranted about on COMP.OS.VMS.

Regardless, you could learn a few things from VMS. Linux could learn a lot, structurely. VMS was _designed_ (when Olson, the engineer, was CEO) and does so many things right... Even though Compaq has butchered the site, try the OpenVMS Website to learn more. The Documentation and FAQ links are there.

--Rubinstien

It's good to see some people here recommending ovms!, I would recommend anyone with an old alpha or vax to try the openvms hobbyist program. Because, well, let's face it, sometimes unix can get a little bit, err, boring. old. learned. done. or maybe that is just me. further information on the OpenVMS hobbyist program can be found at http://www.montagar.com/hobbyist/ and if I know HTML like I hope I do OpenVMS Hobbyist Program

And he's contrasting this to Windows 2000? Ummmm....waitaminit...W2K is just NT5.

Windows NT was originally written by a bunch of guys from DEC who wrote VMS. Hence, NT can be said to have derived much from VMS, which is well over 20 years old (here's some history). What does that mean for NT?

Clearly, that age doesn't mean a damn thing. Newer does not necessarily mean better. I'd rather have an OS that has evolved from decades of trial and error than something just out of Redmond, and I'm sure many others would as well.

I've been running Linux intermittently for several years (and exclusively for the last 6 months). I've also run windows 95/98, and NT4, and a beta of W2K when it was still NT5. NT5 is a pretty cool OS -- the relative (to win98) reliability and security of NT, and directx for games--yay.

This seems to be where everything is headed currently -- what used to be solely server/workstation operating systems are now becoming gaming platforms. NT is adopting directx6; Unix is getting XFree86 4.0 with all sorts of cool additions. This is A Good Thing (tm), which you should acknowledge even if you hate NT.

Curiously, the same reason that I used Windows is the reason I switched from Windows to Linux. Linux support for hardware used to suck. My TV card didn't work, there was no 3d acceleration (for my TNT), the games sucked. So, I used Windows and put up with the occasional reboot. Eventually, I got fed up with Windows. I hated having to run Exceed to be able to access some of the programs I needed for classes (Matlab, Maple, LaTeX, etc.). So I installed Linux and dealt with the lack of good hardware and game support.

I can get my TV card working with a 2.2 series kernel (which I still haven't gotten to work without breaking AFS, which kind of defeats the whole purpose), and now with NVidia releasing open source drivers, I don't have to worry about 3D acceleration. I really don't have a single qualm about not running Windows...the only games I play are Q/Q2/Q3 anyhow.

Simply put, I have no need for Windows. I haven't booted up Windows in months (I'm pretty sure mucking around with VMWare killed it anyhow), and if I do need it for anything (say, if I buy a digital camera and need to get the pictures off it), I can use VMWare (damn that's an impressive program).

Windows is not going to disappear any time soon. Neither will Linux. Both OSes have built up way too much steam to just roll over and die. Deal with it. Use whichever suits you best. Believe it or not, Linux is not the best OS for some (gasp! blasphemy!) -- my mom still has problems copying and pasting -- I don't think she's ready to be configuring XFree86 (which, while RedHat 5.2 has made some significant changes to make configuring XFree easier, still requires some knowledge about your computer's hardware, which most people haven't a clue about [horizontal refresh frequency? dot clock?]). If you want to use Linux, use it. But don't unnecessarily evangelize an OS that is not ready to replace Windows yet.

Better yet, use Linux conspicuously. Answer questions about Linux. Let them come to you -- don't force it down their throats. Then prove the esteemed Mr. Metcalfe wrong.