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IBM Cranks OS/2 Curtain, Compaq Revives OpenVMS
Freshly Exhumed writes "This site has a couple of divergent OS sagas ... IBM is basically saying "Bring out your dead" to OS/2 fans. Compaq has listened to the faint cries of "I'm not dead yet" and announced a reprieve for OpenVMS." OS/2 has repeatedly refused to die before, though. One interesting snippet from the article on VMS: "The Wildfire version of the Alpha processor will allow users to run OpenVMS in the same box as Compaq's Tru64 Unix operating system, using hard partitioning techniques." IBM 390, upcoming Alphas ... when will mainstream chips do this? :)
I think they know that the real OS/2 user community is also the Linux community. They are investing a lot and I think they're hedging their bets a little.
Don't just whine about poor internet privacy and freedom policies,
Basically, I am trying to draw a contrast between hardware and software. Hardware gets melted. Software doesn't.
Netlabs.Org s a great starting point for people interested in OS/2. Not only do they have Project Odin But they also have many other interesting developments. Project ODIN is the PE to LX converter that allows Windows 95/98/NT binaries to be converted or ran natively on OS/2. There is a new SB Live driver that has been ported from Linux that also created a new library and code to allow OpenSound modules to be used in OS/2. (FIlling in the sound card gap) and alas there is a small passthrough driver that makes WinOS2 think you have a SB 16 installed so that no matter what soundcard you have as your OS/2 driver you won't have to find those tricky "WinOS2" drivers.. just use this "passthrough" one.
On another note, Papyrus 8 was just released. It really is a nice tight/integrated "Office" suite that still fits on 3 floppy disks (yes it does hehe) and PMview 2000 is coming out with a new version.
The most interesting note is the integration of Warp Server E-Business codebase with that of OS2 Warp 4. This was done through Fixpack 13. If you upgrade to Fixpack 13 your not limited to the 528 megs addressable space anymore, you have the 32bit KEE extensions for 32 bit filesystem driverws (such as jfs) and there are many more updates and new addons available.
On top of that a great company called scitech has released video drivers for TNT, TNT2, Geforce, 3dfx (all versions) and Matrox (all versions) cards that make the graphics fly. OpenGL and MGL acclerated support are available as well. (i believe the url is http://www.scitechsoft.com for this company).
As well as having the fastest Java implementation around, one of the best Dos/Windows and OS2 environment easiest to port to platforms, i don't know why ibm would kill it. The device drivers are there, the end users wishing for a new version are there.. and why would they continue to add 32 bit BSD based ip stacks, SMP and server related systems to kill it a measly 12 months from now?
Interesting indeed, but as usuall looks like a laywer and a business need to review this "Future plan" for OS/2 and see what it really means. I can't see IBM telling a bank to redo everything in java when there is NO support for java other then stock tickers and web page games..
And boy howdy, how sweet of a development platform Visual Age C++ 4.0 for OS/2 is once they iron out the bugs.. use the Open API and your app will compile under NT as well.. woah, offer a choice who would have ever thought of that!
>> Then tell the VMS person about how we're getting different languages to work together. They will look at you in amazement, wondering why there isn't a standard calling convention that all the languages use.
>OK, I'm really skeptical about this. Maybe this works for what I'd guess are 'traditional' VMS languages (C, FORTRAN, and maybe COBOL). And linking C/C++ and Fortran isn't that unusual. But could I link, say, C++ and Ada95 together?
Yes. See, DEC decided not to support Ada95 natively so they had ACT port GNAT (based on GCC) to VMS. So VMS should support Ada95 w/ C++ as well as/ as poorly as Unix does.
I still don't understand what he's saying about getting different languages to work together though. Everything compiled in Unix uses the C calling conventions, and even early Unix C, Pascal and Fortran compilers let you intermix code, IIRC.
*mismarked* bolts. get it?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
At least MS bundled more stuff. Yea, it sucked, but it's nice not to be nickled and dimed. I forgot how much that pissed me off.
You're probably thinking of Dave Cutler, who was one of the main architects, if not the main architect, of VMS (and RSX-11M, I think), and was one of the main architects, if not the main architect, of NT.
I'm sorry, when you say "I come here to bury OS/2 not praise it" you are morally obliged to praise it. It's called whatchamacallit. There's a word, something fancy. The passive periphrastic. No, that's not it, it just sounds good. Anyways, the idea is you say you're gonna say something and then say the opposite. I'm too tired. I onlypost tired, and I can't type tired. Go figger
Disclaimer: The above made absolutely no sense. Please moderate this to oblivion.
OS/2 was admittably a better OS than Windows. However, besides its frequent and unexpected crashes Windows has dominated the market. The reason behind the fall of OS/2 was not its incompetence but the weakness of the IBM sales staff. I've worked at IBM and I know. IBM is a great company when it comes to research and development. I mean look at all the innovations that have come out of the Almaden Lab alone (copper interconnects, Microdrive, load-unload, data mining etc...). Every year more patents are filed by IBM than any other high tech company. The problem is when it comes to competing on the "competitive" market, IBM is lacking. Maybe their image is all wrong, I don't know what. All I know is their ultra star hard drives are great. That is the problem though they have great technology but no flashy image, and unfortunately that is what you need to sell to the average consumer. IBM and OS/2 were both robbed by Microsoft but I won't shed a tear over this. As far as I'm concerned it's business. If any other company could come along and tear Microsoft to pieces it would, that is how our system works, pure capitalism. I personally feel that we should bury OS/2 and call it good. Besides when you compare OS/2 to current operating systems it just doesn't cut it any more. I think the future of operating systems will be with the high end Unix clones like FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. Linux doesn't scale well enough, at least not yet. OS/2 is dead, get over it.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
I read the partitioning to mean virtualizable -- ie able to run operating systems as processes, nested arbitrarily. This is what the s390 guy did who had 40000 odd linux kernels running simultaneously.
Note that vmware does a variant of this, but because they do it on the i386, they have to jump trough hoops. The i386 isn't virtualisable, so they have to scan for instructions that would expose this and rewrite them to a trap to some meta-level code.
It stands to reason that if you have the ability to run two OSs on one CPU, the capability carries over to SMP configurations too.
/*
There are still folks out there running DOS 3, not to mention the Cult of the Amiga and the Trash-80 and the Timex-Sinclair. How do you put a stake through the heart of these beasts? (esp. one that Big Blue sold to banks, governments, etc).
*/
Why should anyone stop doing what their doing? If it works use it, if it's more fun stick with it!
"Now, for only 15 dollars a month, less then the price of a daily cup of coffee, a third world child can have food, immunizations, and OS/2"
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Substantial portions of OS/2 were written by Microsoft. It was originally a joint IBM-Microsoft project. Microsoft and IBM split up the project after OS/2 1.2. Microsoft would have to sign off on any attempt to open source OS/2. The chance of that is about as good as the chance of Natalie Portman becoming my love slave.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
> It's syntax was hard as hell. It was sorta arcane. UNIXes were heaven compared to it.
No more so than Windows is "more intuitive" than Unix. I happened to use VMS before either of those, and sometimes I still long for the simple clarity of the VMS command line.
But I know it's just a matter of familiarity. Universalist claims on either side are unsupportable.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Uh, If there wasn't UNIX and vms, linux would not exist. I like Linux, but I ain't a zealot like you!
The "Open" in Open VMS means open systems, not open source. Basically means the OS/NOS in the release plays nice in the sandbox with other OS/NOS's
Don't just whine about poor internet privacy and freedom policies,
No, the next Y2K scare will the Unix inspired 2038 problem, when all the 32 bit time counters roll over. OpenVMS will still be plugging happily along (even on 32-bit platforms), because the people who designed OpenVMS didn't assume that it would all be replaced in 10 years. (In VMS, the core time representation is a 64 bit quantity, with resolution to a millisecond (IIRC) and range from sometime 1500s until > AD10000.)
Difference between VMS and OpenVMS: 4 letters. Back when Sun/HP/IBM were claiming "open systems", DEC decided to rename the OS. Unfortunately, they did it about the same time they released the first Alpha machines and confused the issue, making some people think that OpenVMS was something to do with the Alphas.
"Legacy systems: the ones that work."
OS/2 has been a lame horse since the beginning. It's about time it got shot. But at least IBM is attempting to make OS/2 programs platform neutral instead of leaving OS/2 people in the lurch. They should be commended for that.
When the pack animals stampede, it's time to soak the ground with blood to save the world. We fight, we die, we break our cursed bonds.
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
But to digress to a similar story: One time, in my former job, we had a few seconds of power failure in our building, and I, in a corridor at the time, heard cries of woe everywhere from colleagues, whose windows thingies had failed them. Smiling, for I _am_ a BOFH, I returned to my identical hardware, mightily surprised to see my Linux box still in the very same shape I left it in. Much gloating ensued, I can tell you. And I started reading the next Usenet article. My guess is a capacitator for just such power failures wasn't big enough for Windoze (3.1 at the time, I think), idle or not, but enough for an idle Linux box.
Stefan.
I'd hate VMS dying, for it did some wonderful things with hardware in my time.
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
There are still quite a few die-hard OS/2 fans in IBM (Many of whom read this site.) I expect they'll probably be bitter about it, but many of them were starting to make the jump to Linux, if only because it lets them work however they want to, not however someone else wants them to.
I'm glad Linux at least is beyond IBM's control. They'd find some way to fuck it up, otherwise.
In many ways OS/2 is also a study of what not to do with an operating system. IBM tried to preserve backward compatability at all times, to the detriment of the design. It seems like the Linux crowd is avoiding the mistakes IBM made. And it's finally realizing the IBM dream of one OS that will run on all their hardware (Something they wanted to do with OS/2 but were never able to accomplish.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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
Everything compiled in Unix uses the C calling conventions, and even early Unix C, Pascal and Fortran compilers let you intermix code, IIRC.
Less true nowadays, especially with OO languages like C++ and Ada95, which doesn't fit well into systems designed for procedural languages. You can link C and C++ together, but you can run into trouble, especially when using two different C++ compilers, as there is not standard C++ ABI (or even a decent de-facto standard). The g++ ABI changes every few releases (which I don't mind too much: I would much rather have them get it right than use the first thing they managed to come up with, and then be stuck with backwards compatible hacks for the next 5 years). OTOH, C ABIs are well defined for virtually all major platforms, which is fortunate, as otherwise you would be unable to use gcc, with, say, Solaris C libraries.
Well, in my shop we're using VMS to support realtime telemetry processing, analysis, and anomaly resolution. We can't of course boast of uptimes in years because we're constantly upgrading our hardware and software and reconfiguring our networks. But the clustering is very robust.
And yes, you really can get code written in any lanugage linked together.
And the brethren went away edified.
"Compaq OS/2" was a branded version of MS OS/2 (like "Compaq DOS" and even "Compaq Windows") -- in the old days MS didn't feel like slathering their name all over everything.
Anyway, I thought Pathworks was something else entirely different, not that it really matters.
Thank you.
Are you the Hot Grits troll? If only I could be so honored....
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
thought they were going all linux?
There will always be hardcore fans using it. However, in the Internet era, the useful lifespan of an unmaintained operating system is only until the next remote root exploit comes out or the next new technology is impossible for users to get working on it. E.g. does it have IPv6 support? (just one possible death knell for an unmaintained OS)
Hmmm, yes, that's the problem with relying on a big vendor for a proprietory solution - in a few years time, "proprietory" can turn into "dead".
As a side note, I wonder what the chances of somebody buying OS/2 are? (I mean to develop, not to use)
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Quite funny to see all you people wanting the OS/2 source released, when it actually IS available.. Well some of it at least.
;)
:)
Through "legal" channels you can get hold of almost anything you want, through the developer connection, if you prove reasonable reasons why you should have it. And what about JFS?
As for "illegal" channels, the kernel source is "out there". And some other parts of the sources aswell. Maybe someone should have a look? Ofcourse "for educational purposes only"...
Oh and for those who wonder.. I'm still using OS/2. All the time. And until it doesn't do the job I need it to do better than any of the alternatives, I stick with it. Fuck IBM
Love over Gold.
Businesses also WANT to be the sole supplier of anything they sell... Doesn't mean it's good for anyone in the long run.
Some anonymous coward replied:
It doesn't mean it's bad for anyone in the long run, either.
Well, AC, I figure you must have really liked the old Soviet Union, the former paradise of the single-source suppliers.
It really didn't seem to me like that at the time, and still doesn't now. Maybe it was just the particular TeamOS/2 Israel I was in and its 'leadership', but back then it was just a bunch of harmless guys who enjoyed diddling with OS/2. We had some support from IBM Israel, especially in organizing meetings, but on the whole it didn't seem more than a hobby of a few dedicated people. There wasn't much zealotry, not even in the mailing list, and when bit-by-bit members of the team resigned to using NT or Linux because they had enough of a dead OS, it was met with understanding, not scorn.
All in all, it was a nice experience, even if 'we didn't win in the end'...
A beo. . Oh, never mind.
This is good news however, there are a lot of shops out there waiting on the OpenVMS releases and from all the corporate restructurings etc. have had to wait way too long. Very glad to see Compaq make good on it's promise to keep the OpenVMS track alive at least for a few more releases.
Don't just whine about poor internet privacy and freedom policies,
Sure, I like UNIX, but there are many advantages to VMS about which a UNIX only geek of today might never learn. VMS is a solid, highly secure OS -- to toss this technology away is plain folly.
I honestly think we'd be better off just devoting time and effort to fixing the (few) areas where the free Unixes are not as good as VMS then we would be trying to salvage anything useful from it.
I really, really don't like VMS. It may be a stable system, but I can't help but wonder if that isn't because it is even uglier then Unix is, and thus no one uses it. The Unix command line at least appeals to geeks after they get to know it, but even the VMS advocates I know agree that it is Very Messy Syntax.
"I've used Mach; Mach is one of the reasons I think micro-kernels are a bad idea. I've used VMS; VMS is one of the reasons I think VMS is a bad idea." -- Linus Torvalds
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Why should anyone stop doing what their doing? If it works use it, if it's more fun stick with it!
I agree. That's the advice I give to others who think they have to keep upgrading/buying software as if they were adding fuel to a car.
...yet, then again, I gave away a box of OS/2 software -- including 3 boxed versions and a dozen+ commercial apps -- to someone at the begining of the year. I hadn't used it for a couple years and had moved exclusively to Linux.
But then again, I've got a small group of abandoned SPARC Station 1 and 2s here also...go figure!
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I want one for OpenVMS, except it could say something like "MCR OPCCRASH".
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
The similarity of the name to PS/2 might have been a factor: it created the impression that one needed a PS/2 to run OS/2. Also, OS/2 1.x was not marketed well. One couldn't just walk into Egghead Software and pick up a copy of OS/2. Finally, the "DOS Coffin" in 1.x was not compatible enough with real DOS.
Free-form file names, bundled Internet software, full-featured GUI: J. Random Luser probably thinks these are Windows innovations. Yet OS/2 had all of these before Windows did. Shame. OS/2 could have been a contender.
--
Oooh, moderator points! Five more trolls and idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delenda est Windoze
--
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delenda est Windoze
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
VMS is very good, there's no doubt about it. However, comparing VMS to OS/390 is like comparing Win95 to FreeBSD.
In a way, it is a shame that a system that was arguably better than windows got left in the dust.
On the other hand, it *is* IBM, who in there own day raised as much passion and hate as Microsoft does today.
the final rewards of arrogance, I suppose...
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
At the bottom of the article was this sniglet.
We were spending millions developing NT on Alpha, but when we looked at the value proposition when compared to NT on Intel, it didn't differentiate NT on Alpha,' he said.
Doh!
Don't just whine about poor internet privacy and freedom policies,
OTOH, the Workplace Shell (desktop UI, arguably the best part of OS/2) is IBM alone. Most of the services are, and the kernel is probably 99-100% IBM code nowadays as well.
Microsoft's biggest part is the HPFS386 filesystem, for which they still charge IBM several hundred dollars' in royalties per copy sold... One reason Warp Server Advanced is so expensive.
Other than that, it's probably not volume of MS code that's the problem, it's figuring out exactly which bits are still theirs, and removing them gracefully.
Geez, we should auto-moderate the first 5 posts for each topic :D.
One can obtain the source code to "Open"VMS from Compaq by signing a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and paying a fee. Typically this is done by big customers who have had a chance to feed bugfixes back in to the OS. This probably does not qualify as Open Source but a customer can obtain the source.
It is probably also worth pointing out the the DECUS hobbyist license lets you run a fully licensed VMS 7.2 OS plus many layered products (e.g. compilers) for a nominal fee (around $US 30.00 to 40.00). One can obtain used Alphas for around US $1000.00 or less these days.
I work for a company that writes backup software. They were the writers of a popular backup/media management package, which does some serious backup. There are still quite a few number of large organazations using VMS/VAX with JukeBoxes. Names that come to mind is CitiBank, Bank of New York,.... Most places even forget (exepect one admin) that they are running VMS for backup because it never breaks. We also mess around with windows 95/98/NT/2K, Linux (slackware, Redhat), and Macs. Comparing VMS (or OpenVMS) is like comparing a bulldozer to a army. Both can destory things but the scope and process is extremely different! -- MPCM
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
So, I really wish IBM would release OS/2 as open source. It is a very good operating system. It is very fast and is much more familiar to us who grew up in the non-Unix part of the world.
It could do great battle with Win98/NT if it were GPL'd. It's just a great piece of engineering. Fully SMP, fast TCP/IP stack, fastest Java JIT, can boot a true DOS VM and play games, WPS, great connectivity, etc.
I know people have said that parts of OS/2 are licensed from other companies. Well, IBM, release as much as you can and we will get it to run.
Please, IBM, let it out as open source. If you really want to get back at Microsoft for dumping you and OS/2, this is how you do it.
I bet you thought linux was hard to use when coming from a dos enviroment. VMS is different, and I *like* having a choice of how the OS is designed and laid out. VAXen are extremely reliable, how many boxes have spanned a decade of operation? Theres plenty of VAXen from the 80's still chugging away in closets. Why? Because it continues to work.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
As a former OS/2 user, I come here to bury OS/2 not praise it. Praise is useful to the living, not the dead, and then only when deserved.
IBM's announcemnt a few weeks ago about a "transition" from OS/2 to other operating systems just made official what has been a fact for a few years. OS/2 hasn't been IBM's focus, a smarter multi-OS whatever the customer wants approach is what they've obviously used.
Oddly enough...after another look at the same announcement today shows that IBM has changed the text...making it sound even positive...as if OS/2 isn't really going away.
Don't believe a bit of the soft-padded inclusion of OS/2 -- there's no practical reason to use it.
The Register got it right when they talked about the original announcement.
As a former OS/2 user, I have to ask that others not waste time on Amiga-style wishes to revive any part of OS/2. The WPS was sweet, but unfortunately the GUI as a whole was unstable. Sure, it was better then what the other guys offered but that's faint praise.
Since then, the tools and operating systems have improved. Any OS that has fallen behind won't be able to keep up without borrowing from the leaders. I'm even doubtful that closed operating systems can keep ahead of open ones -- even Apple seems to have realized that.
While it would be great to take a look at the code from OS/2 -- and maybe even incorporate a few parts -- it's not realistic. Most of the parts have been superceeded by better, open, programs.
Even the potentially good stuff such as the WPS GUI and the b-tree support in HPFS is co-owned with Microsoft -- so there's no chance that we'll ever see it.
Besides, with KDE/Gnome and the file system changes that coming along, there's very little to pick from the carcas if it were available.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
What makes you think OS/2 is(was) lame? Back when you could run dos and win 3.1 or OS/2 the choice was clear. You had a fully 32 bit OS that ran all the win3.1 programs and was truly multi tasking. It had the HPFS filesystem and a pretty sweet GUI.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Microchannel wasn't all that bad. It was just backed up by a pathetic business and marketing plan.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
It shows that VMS can take much more flaky hardware errors than can UNIX.
... kills an I/O processor, more likely than not, a UNIX will crash. Another bullet-proof OS, for example, could handle an I/O processor going out in the middle of operation and still keep running.
;-)
Well, I suppose VMS could implement some kind of ECC code in software, sort of a RAID-for-RAM, if you will, and that might help -- unless the bad RAM contains the ECC engine, of course. But really, this sort of thing is a hardware issue.
It's true. Even Win95 is less susceptible to flaky hardware than Linux is. Some severly overclocked systems will run on Win95, but crash on Linux.
Well, that's kind of a mis-truth. You often hear stories of Windows running where Linux does not. This is usually because of one of two reasons:
(1) Cheap OEMs designing hardware that works with Windows, rather then designing hardware that meets the specifications.
(2) Windows doesn't use as much of the hardware as it should. For example, in any SMP system, the extra processors could be defective and Win95 wouldn't notice. Linux would. Does that make Win95 fault tolerant?
(As an aside: I suspect BeOS is the same as Linux here. BeOS also is a much more sophisticated OS then '95.)
Take a PC running Win95 for example. If one
Er, not really. Most OSes I've seen will recover nicely enough if a non-critical system fails. Even Win9X will, assuming failing applications don't take out the kernel in their death. Now, if, say, the system drive fails, then you can bet that will kill most any system. The solution is redundant hardware -- it works better and faster then software solutions anyway.
(I don't know what an "I/O processor" is supposed to be. Severely failing hardware on a PC generally generates an NMI, which cannot be trapped, by any OS.)
I have no experiance with VMS...
But hey, lack of knowledge has never stopped you from posting before, right?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I've used both Linux and OS/2 since 1992, for example, and I know a lot of OS/2 folks (and ex-OS/2 folks) who are Linux users. You're right that the business OS/2 user base is unlikely to be interested in Linux, though. Most Unix folks who lump OS/2 in with Windows don't have a clue about its capabilities...
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Right. Then you ask him how much it cost, and you can laugh at him. Normal people can actually afford to make Beowulf or MOSIX clusters.
That ain't anything close to VMS clustering.
Beowulf and friends are distributing processing tools. They take an easily paralizable job and handle the mechanics of distributing it for you. Beowulf is mostly application-level software; the machines still function as seperate hosts.
A VMS cluster essentially turns a group of machines into a single machine. All resources are multiplexed into a single logical unit. If one of them fails, the others pick up all the work it left behind. Beowulf is nothing like it. Doesn't even come close.
(I say this as someone who would rather bash his head into the wall then use VMS. I prefer Unix, but I know where we still haven't beat the competition -- yet.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
More to the point, these customers are still paying IBM tons of money for OS/2 licenses and support. As long as they can make money from OS/2, IBM won't start giving it away for free...
Ball State University in Muncie, IN had an entire cluster of them as recently as a couple years ago.
Purdue University's Calumet campus in Hammond Indiana still teaches "operating system fundamentals" (i.e. how to use a command line for CS students that have never had to use one) and a small number of programming classes on a VMS box (axp.calumet.purdue.edu).
Of course, when the old man that's in charge of those classes finally retires or dies, that VMS box will be someone's Linux/Alpha machine in about two seconds.
I know of no reason to build new systems on the VMS platform, but maybe someone else can explain that one.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
You're forgetting one thing: most businesses could care less about which specific OS they're using *as long as it gets the job done*. 99.999% of the world doesn't share your lust for learning new API's, OS's, applications, &c. They just want something that will allow them to do the work they need, and do it quickly and efficiently. And other things equal, an organisation would rather support one platform than two, three or ten platforms. After all, they're in some other primary business, not dicking around hacking on a bunch of cobbled-together systems. Leave 'diversity' to the university research labs. The whole fiasco with M$ concerns Win9x/NT's inadequacy, not its monopoly status as such. I guarantee you people wouldn't be screaming 'Monopoly!' nearly as loudly if Red Hat or SuSe were taking Microsoft's place in the defendant's chair.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
I got a 2 through my karma. I missed the earlier ES7000 posts because I was browsing at a higher score at the time. Sorry for the repeat info.
-- soldack
Oh yeah, and I hasten to add: most businesses look at the applications they want FIRST, and THEN the operating system which will run those apps. Most garden-variety IS people don't say, 'I'll choose BozoOS because it has several threaded input queues and an asynchronous printing architecture.' They say, 'I'll choose BozoOS because it runs XYZ Accounting Package.'
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
IBM traditionally announces x number of years of free support when a product is released. Then it moves to paid support. Warp 4 was released in 1996, so that's five years of free updates and service releases. That's more than MS ever offered for Windows, by the way.
In fact, they often end up extending the support period. Free Warp 3 support only ended last fall, around two years (IIRC) after the originally announced date. They may do the same with Warp 4.
And remember, this is just free support, which basically means home & SOHO users (the same users IBM claims not to support at all!). Their enterprise users all have paid support contracts, and believe me, IBM will continue to upgrade and support OS/2 for these people.
Even Warp 3 is still receiving support and service upgrades, you just have to pay for it now...
Incidentally, support for Warp Server for e-business expires in May, 2002. That's three years support; okay, could be better, but again, that's just free support (and they may extend it).
IBM's full 'release strategy' is here:
http://www-4.ibm.com/software/os/wa rp/strategy/
Basically nothing has changed!
The SOHO concept has been ereased from the IBM dictionary a long time ago.
Once again they are going for the software independent concept again (Last time they tried with the brilliant OpenDOC technology)...now it is JavaBeans+XML.
Which means that it doesn't matter what OS you're using..as long as it supports JavaBeans....
The strategy announcement is saying that they will not continue to support the Warp 4...but it isn't saying anything about the Warp 4.5 (released last juli...featuring a new kernel, JFS and acouple of new API's)...and I hear an upgrade of this one is being developed...In march FP13 for Warp 4 was released...featuring the Warp 4.5 uniprocessor kernel (read: a kernel upgrade)...thereby changing the attention of the developers to this new 32-bit kernel....and it works the first driver with Kee support has arrived (The SBLive port)....
In the last 5 months....you've been forced to subscribe to Software Choice...if you want anything else but drivers and fixes...like the TCP/IP 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 packages...
Live long and prosper...
One couldn't just walk into Egghead Software and pick up a copy of OS/2.
Funny, ISTR doing just that. "OS/2 for Windows", I believe it was called.
Well actually they are making some money on OS/2...last year approx 96mio $ (If my memory serves me right).
Another problem is the MS licenses..there are quite a few...
Live long and prosper...
Or partial opening of the source to allow some self suppport? At least it, runs Java so theres life in it yet.
I suppose it is just wishful thinking that they would do anything so benevolent, especially with M$ looking over their shoulder. This might would go against their attempts to push people forward to newer systems, they dont really want to encourage people to use it.
monthy python nostalgia:
(* do you remember when we did not used to be nostalgic. *)
Gah when will news sites learn. Computers are not hard Barbie, not even difficukt. Spelling is diffficcult howevver.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Nah, the next big y2k scare will be the unix date rollover in 2038 I think.
pornking
VMS uptimes? Try decades not years. A VAX that runs as part of the railroad system in Germany has been up and running for more that 18 years. A switch controller used by MCI ran for 13 years with only 45 minutes downtime. My own personal best is 3.5 years on a non clustered 3200 that had no UPS (hence would go out with the power). When DEC^H^H^HCompaq marketing says "nothing stops it" they are not kidding.
I know European airlines that run payroll on OS/390 and have to re-IPL (reboot) every day as a matter of standard operating procedure. With Galaxy Alphas have caught up with S/390 LPAR technology, but with VMSclusters VMS is still ahead of parallel sysplex technology and has been since 1982.
You can get the source from DEC, oops Compaq if you are a large customer, also I beleive it comes when you purchase their mission critical support service.
On the otherhand you can get basically the same product by going with FreeVMS which has about 2 dozen links posted here in this thread.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
> It would be nice to see IBM open-source-ify OS/2...
I don't think they can. The code for OS/2 isn't all theirs, AFAIK. I believe a fair amount of it belongs to Microsoft.
Any chance of compiling bash for VMS, I don't have the source in front of me but I have seen projects that are source compatable with both UNIX and VMS (as well as Windows and OS/2).
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
Actually next to impossible that they'd release OS/2 source code... too many copyright/license issues with Microsoft.
If you need a bulletproof environment, host it in a bad ass datacenter like Andover just did. Make it all redundant and always stay 30 ahead of capacity.
Simple enough, but it'll cost a fortune.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Oh for the days of qio and qiow!
OS/2 for Windows was OS/2 2.1, not the 1.x versions he was talking about. Instead of including Win 3.1 code, it used a user's already-licensed and installed copy of Win 3.1 for Win3.1 compatibility. If could also be handy if you had no interest in running Win3.1 programs under OS/2.
One of the third-party OS/2 vendors(Stardock?) recently tried to push something like that. I don't think they got too far with IBM on it.
To the point where, under OS/2 2.1, they marketed a version(dubbed "OS/2 for Windows") that would grab a user's existing Win 3.1 and use it directly.
I think OS/2 sponsored the Fiesta Bowl, not the superbowl.
Agreed. It's one of the things that still has me using OS/2 as my primary computer at home, rather than switching entirely to Linux(OTOH, the 3 other computers all run Linux). I'd love to see IBM port the WPS to X for use on Linux. I'd gladly pay per-machine for it.
If you're talking about the SIQ, that can't be "fixed", because some apps depend on it. I believe it allows applications like VoiceType to work.
(SIQ = system/single input queue, where all mouse/keyboard messages go through the foreground app before being dispatched to other apps)
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
To answer your question, No.
More importantly, your assertion that VMS hasn't been 'hacked and refined' like the more open unix is totally off base.
VMS has been engineered. Unix has been hacked. There's a big difference in the quality (I admin both kinds of systems).
VMS used to come with source listings on microfiche, before most of the world had heard of 'open source' (or more importantly, free software). I think they stopped doing that around 6.0. Even so, I have a whole cabinet full of SPR's and their responses from my predecessor sitting in a file cabinet. They are fun to read through. Larry was often able to find a problem, go to the source listing and diagnose it, then send off an SPR to Digital and have it corrected. This enjoyed many of the advantages of open source, and was certainly more than you could do with a SunOS installation during the same time.
VMS is no more proprietary than OS/2, Windows 95, or anything else. And source listings are still available on CD, but cost something now ($1200 or so, I think).
I, too, wish they'd open the source, since there are those screaming for an IA64 port that could probably pull it off...
--Rubinstien
-- http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/
Another place I worked had an AS/400 in a closet. While there was a little wall unit air conditioner, one day the janator turned it off. The company called me in a panic, with the system down and about 100 customers waiting for service. The system had gone down rather and it was at least 100 farenheit in the closet. I set some fans up in the doorway and managed to get the thing up long enough to take care of the customers.
Both VMS and OS/400 are at least as complex as UNIX. They're real operating systems that offer all the requisite operating system services. Both VMS and OS/400 come with huge stacks of documentation. The university had a table with 30 or 40 orange books documenting every aspect of VMS, OS/400 had a similar amount of documentation.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The OS/2 community had been doing a lot of work on emulating win32 programs, and I have read that a lot of this know-how is being channeled into Wine on Linux.
:)
Note that this is not code from IBM itself, but from OS/2 enthusiasts.
Also, someone was also porting a very cool Asteroids-like game called 'Roids over to Linux the last time I checked. Great game, but yeah, a somewhat questionable name...
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
User areas were numbered instead of named, so you could go to area 1, 2, 3, etc. I think there were up to 8 of them on a disk.
There were, of course, no subdirectories in either CP/M or pre-2.0 MS-DOS.
D
----
Well I was a die-hard OS/2 user, and I always thought OS/2 sucked, but it sucked a lot less than any offering out at the time. (I now use Linux and BeOS, and NT when I'm using VisualCafe or writing ASP). NT in its current state is marginally better than OS/2 Warp 4.0. But the reason OS/2 was reverred was because it had all the makings of being great (well.. except for SIQ). I'm suprised you don't see it written more in slashdot that while OS/2 users hated Microsoft, they really loathed IBM.
:)
Anybody who can stand here now and say that they'd claim Win3.1 was a great little OS if OS/2 ruled the world deserves an aisle seat in hell. (
But in many respects I can see that OS/2 would have been bad for the industry (although not as bad as Microsoft has been) because IBM would ruthlessly impose their intellectual property ideas on everyone just like MS and IBM wouldn't be backing linux. But at least there wouldn't have been market dominance in applications and operating systems by the same company.
So there.
Believe with me, my saplings.
I worked on DG/UX at one point. Data General had some cool clustering technology (I think VMS still had an edge there, though.) and a lot of B2 security stuff (ACLs, Mandatory and Discretionary access control.) They also had some pretty advanced hardware and were one of the leaders in NUMA technology. It's kind of a pity that they didn't enjoy more success despite their excellent technologies.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Many Slashdotters think that Unix = Good, everything else = bad, but a Unix monopoly would be as bad as a Microsoft monopoly. Many computers users are not even AWARE that there are more than three operating systems available (Unix, Mac, and Windows). Diversity is good! Microsoft's downfall does not mean we should should have yet another monopoly. That's why I welcome alternative systems such as VMS and OS/2 and all of the others.
VMS and OS/2 are extremely good systems. VMS is by far my favorite operating system in the world, and we can only hope that the industry trend is to have MORE different types of systems. This is very good from a security standpoint, because a bug in one system would not be able to take down the whole world. But from a personal point of view, I think most techies would be very bored in a world where there is only one system (I know I would!). The whole excitement of computers is learning new systems, logging on to a new OS for the first time, learning a new language, a new API, etc. If all of the world is an Intel PC running Linux (as it increasingly is becoming), there's isn't a fun any more.
Demand diversity. Run VMS. Run OS/2. Run OS/390. Buy a Tandem. Get an old HP mainframe. Demand support for these systems from ISP's, ISV's, web sites, and the like. A one-platform universe if it is Linux or Windows or TRS-DOS is a very, very boring and dangerous thing.
The nail went in the coffin with Warp 4. Their largest/strongest customer base was in corporations... so what did they do...
Well of course they fixed the serious GUI message queue problems, made performance enhancements to the shell, and made the FS layer completely 32bit....
Oh wait... that's what they should have done. In true old IBM... "we have no clue what's going on so we'll see what we can do to kill of the product".... they added voice recognition.
I could hear the "What the Heck!" uttered with the announcement... As all the companies promising applications quietly dump the projects.
Anyways, that's when I bailed. Fortunately IBM these days has really turned things around... first sign of that... they didn't immediately destroy Lotus (it was dying anyways but they didn't help it along).
"If they're not making any money off of it and they don't want it anyway.."
Last I checked they made more profit on OS/2 then Red Hat generated revenue. I guess it's all a perception thing.
War is necrophilia.
All the high-end vendors support partitioning and/or recombination in some fashion. There's no technical reason "mainstream," by which I assume you mean "x86" processors could not be arranged in such an architecture. For starters, Intel made a supercomputer, the Paragon I believe, which used 386 processors. It's not a great leap from MPP to partitioning. However, the point is moot, as peecee-type systems aren't likely to have or need this capability. For one, there are usually too few processors for it to be useful; while partitioning one CPU may at times be interesting, it requires a great deal more software and architectural support. For another, people who buy peecee-type systems do so because they want a cheap box. The S/390's partitioning/VM scheme kicks serious ass, but the CPUs and architecture are more than adequate to handle the overhead - x86 CPUs would slow to a crawl. Those who need partitioning can afford to pay for it.
Stefan.
"Boxen" is the Dutch word for the English verb "to box".
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
Actually, the OS/2 Community and the Linux Community only intersect at the point of Microsoft hatred. Most hard core Unix types want nothing to do with OS/2, lumping it in with Microsoft products in the big scheme of things.
IBM's real problem is that the commercial sites still running OS/2 also happen to be very big mainframe customers. So they have to be delicate. (I used to work at a place that felt shafted about the whole Microchannel thing, and consequentally ran right into Microsoft's arms.)
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
For starters, if you haven't used VMS since 1986, you are not qualified to comment on it. If I hadn't used Unix since Version 7 would you value my opinion?
./ -mtime=1 -name '*.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]' -exec grep -i text /dev/null '{}' \;
The main selling point of VMS is clustering. VMS is generally regarded as the leader in clustering technology, and no Unix clustering implementation comes close to VMS's clustering technology even 10 years ago. No Unix clustering technology today implement shared disk clusters, distributed lock managers, or load balance sets.
The newest VMS technology, Galaxy, is one of the most revolutionary advancements in OS technology in the last 10 years - the only Unix with it is Tru64 - who stole it from VMS.
In general, VMS is considered significantly more secure and reliable than Unix. Whereas most Unix systems usually crash every few months, VMS systems have been known to be up for over a decade.
The user interface of VMS is much easier to use, and much more powerful than Unix. It is an English-like syntax. If you think it is arcane, I have to ask, what were you using? The VMS command to search a directory tree of HTML files modified since yesterday for a string is:
$ SEARCH/SINCE=YESTERDAY [DIRECTORY...]*.HTML "TEXT"
The Unix equivalent is:
$ find
It appears to me that the VMS command is much easier to look at and understand.
VMS also supports many features that Unix never will such as file versioning, asynchronous I/O, rational memory management and IPC, calling standard, etc., etc., etc., etc.
unwarranted (n-wôrn-td, -wr-) adj.
Having no justification; groundless: unwarranted interference. See Synonyms at baseless.
Gotta love subconscious word choice, eh? ;-)
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
Depends on how you define "Unix" and "asynchronous I/O". The UNIX 98 spec includes asynchronous I/O calls, in the sense of "start an I/O operation, don't block waiting for it to finish, and deliver an indication (signal, in the case of UNIX) when it completes, e.g. aio_read() and aio_write; at least some implementations of the UNIX API provide async I/O calls. Are they sufficiently close to SYS$QIO? (Perhaps signals aren't as nice as ASTs, but....)
Well, it was one, in part, initially (and there may well still be Microsoft code in it).
Can't somebody in the know please just dump the source in a slashdot post, or get it tabled in parliament somewhere or something?
Believe with me, my saplings.
To my knowledge, Compaq OS/2 was bundled with the software pack bundled with high-end x86 (as much as x86 can be high end, particularly for a company like Digital) servers. So on the CD, you get this special flavour of NT4, a few Unixs, Netware, VMS and 'Compaq' OS/2.
Pathworks... as far as I know... was an X-Client and some related utilities.
Believe with me, my saplings.
No, sorry. I've been away from it for 7 years now, so I haven't kept up with the resources.
If you have an account on that campus machine that you mentioned, you could get a lot of mileage just by logging in and typing 'help'. Unless they have changed things for the worse, their help system is hierarchically arranged, both by subject area and by specific command. I.e., if you ask for help on 'show' it will let you branch downward through 'show users', 'show devices', etc.
The basic gottcha for *n*x users is that the options ("qualifiers") use a slash rather than a dash, e.g. (IIRC!) -
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I first used OS/2 3.0 and apart from it taking out 400Mb of data (that was a lot back then) i liked it. It was certainly better than windows 3.1, but unfortunatly it was let down by poor hardware support. Oneday when I get a spare machine I'll stick it back on for nostalgia :)
That's too bad.
VMS is a damn good Operating System and programming environment which the Free Software community should attempt to replicate. Now that several good free UNIX variants have matured it only makes sense to attempt to "save" older technologies like VMS from the dustbin of history. Also, it would help us Free Software enthusiasts move away from dependency on just UNIX like operating environments. Sure, I like UNIX, but there are many advantages to VMS about which a UNIX only geek of today might never learn. VMS is a solid, highly secure OS -- to toss this technology away is plain folly.
Maybe the community should appeal to Compaq to release as much VMS source as possible under the presumption that opening it's source will reduce long term support costs. I can't imagine VMS support will remain profitable for much longer, and this would let those lingering VMS shops out there support themselves. Also, an x86 port of VMS would just rock!
This is true for many of the older Digital technologies as well. I'd really like Compaq to Open the source for older PDP-11 technologies like RT-11, RSX and RSTS -- if only for their historical value. Yes, I know it's all coded in Macro-11... so what.
I don't think it was just the impression that PS/2 and OS/2 were related -- IBM sold a special "Extended Edition" version of 1.x which only ran on PS/2 hardware. There were also an bunch of tie-ins between OS/2 and IBM's bigger iron products.
The bias was evident also when you looked at the packed-in hardware drivers. It took until version 3.0 until IBM started supporting common 'clone' things like Soundblaster CD-ROMs and HP InkJets out-of-the-box.
People were wary of IBM's plans back in the late 80s -- they were trying to close down the PC market and lock it into proprietary hardware and their closed network infrastructure. When Microsoft jumped ship in 1990, it was official -- the Good Guys were Compaq, Microsoft, Novell, and ISA -- the Bad Guys were IBM, SNA, and MCA. A few years and several billion dollars of red ink later, IBM got a serious attitude adjustment.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Come on, why the hell has this comment been moderated up to +3 insightful? ... There's nothing insightful about it, it's just pure flame bait, nothing more, nothing less.
Ya know, I was wondering that myself, and I posted the comment. I really expected to be moderated down for that. It isn't quite "pure" flame-bait, as that is my honest opinion, but it surely is a flame-worthy message.
I'll echo bungo: Who on Earth moderated that up?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
IBM will use OS/2 on at least the commentator stations in the Sidney 2000 Olympics.
Maybe they will use it in more places but I don't like reading PDFs.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Actually, multitasking and multi threading have no relation to each other. Multi tasking is the ability to run more than one process. Multi-threading is the ability of one process to have multiple, simultanious paths of execution. Both OS/2 and Windows have the same multi-tasking/multi-threading model. For 32bit apps, both are preemptivly multitasked, and many parts of the OS and some apps are multi-threaded. Second, don't go dissing the Win95 process/thread model. It kicks UNIX's all over the place (not in security of course). Under UNIX, a thread is a lightweight process. As such, the scheduler is process oriented, and threads take much more time and resources to create under UNIX. Under OS/2, Windows, and BeOS, a thread is the smallest unit of sheduling, and are very lighweight in terms of resources and creation tim. Lastly, there is no such thing as "true multitasking." Hell, under any definition of mulitasking, DOS had multitasking (TSRs.) Win95, OS/2, BeOS, and Linux both employ something called preemptive multi-tasking, where the OS decides when an app should give up processing to another app. Under cooperative multi-tasking systems, like 16 bit Windows and MacOS 10, the application has to call a function to return control back to the OS so it can shedule another process.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
They can't: too much 3rd party code including MS code that is legally incompatible with the GPL or any OSS license. Some pieces of OS/2 could be opened. In fact, I believe IBM is doing that...see their site. Too bad though, OS/2 is still well ahead of Linux for desktop functionality and useability (e.g. WPS vs KDE/GNOME).
Aide: Grant drinks too much to command an army. Lincoln: Find out what he drinks and give it to my other generals!
A two step program to end the drug problem:
1. Make drugs legal.
2. Put IBM in charge of marketing.
1000 SlashDot sigs
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 $100) from Compaq. It is not open source, but the quality is demonstrably superior than most open source software, except perhaps for the GUI stuff.
The WPS model of having the entire GUI run as a single process with plug-in shared libraries, indeed turned out to be a fatal mistake. The majority of developers out there are nitwits who didn't understand how to correctly implement it. The WPS is pretty stable (a lot more stable than the early versions of Gnome I've used) if you stay away from third party extensions...
While it would be great to take a look at the code from OS/2 -- and maybe even incorporate a few parts -- it's not realistic. Most of the parts have been superceeded by better, open, programs.
You're incorrect in that OS/2 offers quite a bit of functionality that systems like Linux don't (much faster and better multithreading, SMP, memory management and IPC support, for instance), but speaking as someone who's seen the source code of OS/2, unfortunately I'm afraid not much could indeed be done with it - very large parts are written in x86 assembler...
Even the potentially good stuff such as the WPS GUI and the b-tree support in HPFS is co-owned with Microsoft -- so there's no chance that we'll ever see it.
That is incorrect. PM, the windowing and graphics primitive system, is probably indeed an M$ development. Windows 3.0 is a direct rip-off of the 16-bit version in OS/2 1.2 and 1.3. The WPS, however, is a post-M$ IBM development, first present in OS/2 2.0.
HPFS is indeed an M$ development. The new JFS in OS/2, however, is now open source, together with its AIX JFS predecessor and Linux JFS descendant. Getting rid of the M$ HPFS royalties was a big reason for the JFS port to OS/2.
Besides, with KDE/Gnome and the file system changes that coming along, there's very little to pick from the carcas if it were available.
As someone who has programmed both on OS/2 and Unix, I can tell you you're very wrong. OS/2's API is much richer and more consistent than Unix's mess. OS/2 is still by far the fastest and most scalable LAN file server, beating Netware, all Samba implementations and of course Windows SMB implementations hands down. I still haven't seen any GUIs that come close to the WPS model. Java performance on OS/2 kicks the living sh*t out of any Java implementation on Linux...
This post written on an OS/2 system. ;-)
No more so than Windows is "more intuitive" than Unix.
:)
Even though I started my PC OS using career with DOS and Win 3.x, I've always found Unix far more intuitive and easy to use (and I'm even willing to include HP-UX into that statement < g >).
I happened to use VMS before either of those, and sometimes I still long for the simple clarity of the VMS command line.
Well, whatever floats your boat, right? There are actually several VAXen where I work (running some sort of VMS, I really don't touch them if at all possible) - but I tried to log in once and was immidiatly and totally confused.
Just because I'm bored and don't have anything to do this weekend - you wouldn't happen to know of an easy intro to VMS (you know, just something to explain the basics of the sytanx). I was talking to a friend a last year sometime... we came to the conclusion that as nobody uses the VMS machines on campus (as nobody knows how to use them), you could probably root it (well, you probably can't actually root a VMS box, but you know what I mean), and nobody would know for months (hell, maybe years).
I'm sorry, but I don't see what in my contribution you mean to doubt. I grant you, that for a well trained system adminisratir VMS will be easier, because there is more control, and it's more luser-proof. What I did not convey was, that my small experience as a user with VMS did nothing to revisit it, except when demanded hy higher authorities, whereas my meeting with Unix (ConvexOS) amounted to love at first sight. A big difference may have been, that I had the root password of that box right from the start, but I still think, that on the VMS machine I wouldn't have had the same rapport, given I had quite some powers on a MVS machine at the time (and I'm still trying to forget).
Stefan
Different strokes for different folks.
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
are you sure it's Microsoft code?
The VMS operating system is powerful and complete, and has solved problems the Unix people haven't gotten around to thinking about yet.
:)
:)
Well, yeah, that was always the claim DEC made, right?
"With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there." -- Ken Olsen, 1984.
Of course: "There is is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home." -- Guess who?
OK, I honestly don't know VMS at all, so if you can correct the following, feel free to do so:
Like clusters: talk to a VMS person sometime, tell him/her about "linux clusters", and then listen to her/him laugh at you.
Right. Then you ask him how much it cost, and you can laugh at him. Normal people can actually afford to make Beowulf or MOSIX clusters.
Then tell the VMS person about how we're getting different languages to work together. They will look at you in amazement, wondering why there isn't a standard calling convention that all the languages use.
OK, I'm really skeptical about this. Maybe this works for what I'd guess are 'traditional' VMS languages (C, FORTRAN, and maybe COBOL). And linking C/C++ and Fortran isn't that unusual. But could I link, say, C++ and Ada95 together?
And we Linux people our proud of our months of uptime, but VMS people measure uptimes and availability in *years*.
I've seen Linux machines hit year uptimes. But generally, things change so much that it's worthwhile to reboot, if only to change the kernel to the latest version (after all, if someone had a 3 year uptime on Linux they would be running an early 2.0 (maybe even 1.2?)). Also, the environment VMS is generally used in is very different from most Unix machines (especially Linux, being more desktop-oriented than most Unices). From your statement, VMS basically runs things like machinery, etc, where upgrades are rare (being very expensive), and things don't change much. Also they're willing to spend a ton of cash on the hardware, including the machines themselves and probably a UPS the size of a fridge. I suspect that something like FreeBSD, in a similar situation, could perform quite well.
Sheesh... I got curious and started downloading a VMS user's manual from FreeVMS... 1682K... I guess Ken was right.
No, the next Y2K scare will the Unix inspired 2038 problem, when all the 32 bit time counters roll over.
I actually kind of doubt it. Remember time_t? It's a typedef for a reason, after all. On Linux (2.2.15), time_t is typedefed to __kernel_time_t: on all architectures this value is a long. So on CPUs that use a 64bit long (Alpha, Ultra) time_t is already safe. And presumably by 2038 (January 17, ~5 PM IIRC) most people will be using 64 bit CPUs (if not 128/256!).
Though this might be problem for some protocols that use 32-bit fields for numbers, though I actually doubt it, as for any given 32-bit timestamp, you know when the date was sent, as long as you know what 'time period' (ie 1970-2038, 2038-whatever) it's from (which will usually be obvious). Though if a protocol is actually using all 32 bits, it'll be safe until about 2106 (at which point, not only will I be retired, my kids will be retired (oh, yeah, I'll be dead, too)).
Yeah, maybe I'll be wrong, but I think it will be a major 'non-event'.
You're exactly right about the Microsoft hatred being about the only thing in common between the OS/2 and Linux crowds. For someone truly intrested in OS/2 and not into all the politics, one of the most depressing places on the internet has to be comp.os.os2.advocacy.
Excluding the never-ending Tholen threads, which don't have much to do with anything at all, most posts these days are about Microsoft -- sometimes in relationship to OS/2, but a lot of times OS/2 isn't even mentioned at all. Not exactly the best advocacy in the world, especially when any OS/2 developer who decides to also port their software to Win32 has to run the gauntlet of bitter OS/2 users branding them traitors and telling them to go to Hell. You'd think that they'd be pleased that someone is still writing software for OS/2, especially given IBM's own lackluster support, but I guess the hatred is more important. Sad, really.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
How about
find -mtime 1 -name '*.html' -exec grep -i text \;
jackass? It's unreasonable to assume that there will be capital letters in html UNLESS YOUR FILESYSTEM LIKES TO YELL AT YOU.
Hands in my pocket
It means "Convert all your OS/2 client-server apps to Web- or Java-based apps, and then convert the client OS (which has suddenly become irrelevant given a working JVM and Navigator) to SOMETHING OTHER THAN WARP." (Pleading, whining sound on that last bit courtesy of PHB's at IBM.)
- Mark
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Well golly gee! Cool! Is that part of the reason so much 32 bit Linux software breaks when it's ported to Alpha?
:P
Anyone who actually makes an effort at it and avoids stupid hacks will more likely than not have no problems porting code. Though probably anything that can't even port between Linux on Intel and Linux on Alpha is going to be written so sloppily that it isn't much good on any platform.
And anyway, you've got the source, fix it yourself if you don't like it.
I'm rather suprised to hear this. I had an issue w/ useful life of OS/2 a few months back, and IBM told me that they would be updating it through the end of 01, if not for just their core dependants. I had also heard buzz about an updated Warp Server pack due out in Q1, with OEM preview and announcement late Q3. Then again, I think their move to Linux for many of the roles 'reserved' for OS/2 traditionally is putting a crimp it their style, and they'd like to move faster to exploit the explosive curve going on now..
.sig: Now legally binding!
This is incorrect. Nothing in Unix says that threads must be lightweight processes, there are many implementation possibilities. Solaris is the only design firmly in that camp. Linux is actually quite the opposite, if I remember right, in that both processes and threads are created with the same spawn system call.
Also, the (imho only) advantage of lightweight processes is that the the resources to create a thread are far less than any object that the OS is aware of. This is exactly the opposite of what you said.
The problem with lightweight processes is that support requires complex libraries and redundancy with the OS (which has to support multiple processes anyway) and requires non-blocking versions of all system calls, which are much more complex (interesting enough MicroSoft makes a big stink about their non-blocking support and their multi-threading support, when realistically only one of these needs to be implemented!)
Actually that was the selling point of Unix, not VMS. I worked at Dec in 1983 with a group that was porting a compiler for CLU (an old OO language) from BSD Unix to VMS, and this was my introduction to Unix (and I was immediately won over!).
One of the big problems is that the CLU compiler and all of BSD used a far faster calling convention than VMS libraries used (this had to do with which side of the call saved the registers). CLU relied on this fast call, since every method used it (there were no inline methods). Dec's solution was to fix the compiler to recognize non-CLU libraries and use a different calling convention.
Another killer for VMS is that on Unix, a "cp" program was 5 lines long. On VMS the equivalent (pip) was the LARGEST program on the system!
I might as you how I to "find all the files that are named .HTML and not .html" and say that that proves VMS sucks while Unix is great because you have to type a complex command while Unix is simple.
It is still legacy-ware, sorta like cobal. When the next big y2k-like scare hits, I bet VMS will be at fault. :P! Oh yah.. What are the differences between VMS and OpenVMS?
Actually, there are many open OSs that are not UNIX-like. My favorite (for reasons that will becomes obvious soon) is AtheOS. It is a project run by one person, but is actually progressing quite quickly. It even has hardware accelerated drivers for some Matrox cards. The best part is that its architecture was heavily influenced by BeOS, and its file system is basically a clone of BFS that he made using the book that the guy who wrote BFS published.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
There are still folks out there running DOS 3, not to mention the Cult of the Amiga and the Trash-80 and the Timex-Sinclair. How do you put a stake through the heart of these beasts? (esp. one that Big Blue sold to banks, governments, etc).
"IBM wants its customers to deploy ebusiness technology applications concurrently with existing OS/2 applications until platform neutrality has been achieved, and then change the operating system," said the spokesman (quoted from the article)
Wonder if the folks who thought then that they couldn't get fired for buying IBM are sweating, or if they're not getting fired for buying Micro$oft now?
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
This is incorrect. Nothing in Unix says that threads must be lightweight processes, there
are many implementation possibilities. Solaris is the only design firmly in that camp.
Linux is actually quite the opposite, if I remember right, in that both processes and
threads are created with the same spawn system call.
>>>>>>>>
Actually, I believe that you have it reversed. I know Solaris uses their own implementation of threads, and that Linux uses POSIX threads. I have seen test results that show that POSIX threads take 10 times longer to create than NT threads (which take serveral times longer than BeOS threads), and the system slows down significantly at a much lower thread count than under NT and BeOS. (Both of which have nearly a hundred threads from bootup.)
Also, the (imho only) advantage of lightweight processes is that the the resources to
create a thread are far less than any object that the OS is aware of. This is exactly the
opposite of what you said.
>>>>>>>>
Actually, under most systems stuff like semaphores and locks take far less memory. The advantage of threads is two fold. First, the multiple paths allow multiprocessing, and second, they keep subsystems of a single program from having to on one another. This is a big help considering that fact that even the most basic PC these days has four processers, the I/O processor, the graphics processor, the sound chip, and the main CPU.
The problem with lightweight processes is that support requires complex libraries and
redundancy with the OS (which has to support multiple processes anyway) and requires
non-blocking versions of all system calls, which are much more complex (interesting
enough MicroSoft makes a big stink about their non-blocking support and their multi-
threading support, when realistically only one of these needs to be implemented!)
>>>>>>>>>>>
Threads and non-blocking systems calls are neither complex, nor terribly difficult. If the OS is designed from the core to support threads, (like BeOS and NT) multithreading naturally flows to the whole system.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Yes, it is partially hardware, but a great deal software. It shows that VMS can take much more flaky hardware errors than can UNIX. (It's true. Even Win95 is less susceptible to flaky hardware than Linux is. Some severly overclocked systems will run on Win95, but crash on Linux.) Take a PC running Win95 for example. If one shoots the harddrive, and the resultant shock sends a electric surge up and kills an I/O processor, more likely than not, a UNIX will crash. Another bullet-proof OS, for example, could handle an I/O processor going out in the middle of operation and still keep running. I have no experiance with VMS, so I don't know it can do that, but I think that's what the author was getting at.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
O/S 2 is a nice OS, I would have used it more often had there been any real consumer use for it. Has it been open sourced? Or will it? Is IBM just going to drop it like that? It seems dumb that they would jsut drop it and forget about it just like that...
I was comparing lightweight processes with "heavy" threads. "Heavy" threads have OS support, this is what NT uses, it also seems to be the way all other systems are going.
I agree the threads should be in the OS. But the complaint seemed completely wrong to me. The ONLY advantage of "lightweight processes" is that they are LIGHT! Creating one requires ZERO system calls, and thus is faster than any possible OS implementation.
I also agree that non-blocking system calls are not too complex to implement. However if you have any kind of thread support they are NOT necessary. They are only a requirement if you want to allow lightweight threads. It is rather hypocritcal of MicroSoft to make a big deal about both their heavyweight thread support and their non-blocking calls, as these are exactly complements of each other. I would prefer that the non-blocking system calls be removed to simplify the system, but that will never fly with the people who got used to them before threads were introduced.
Posix threads make no requirements that the threads be lightweight. That just defines the interface and can be implemented atop MicroSoft's thread implementation (except for a rather boneheaded missing bit of functionality on MicroSoft's part: there is no atomic operation equivalent to pthread_cond_wait(), but you can do pretty good ignoring this).
Ahh, its all clear now. I didn't realize you were talking about non-OS managed threads. I had the idea that you were saying BeOS and NT threads are resource intensive.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Sheesh... FlameBait, or Troll, maybe... But Offtopic? Mod it down again, and do it right this time! Sheesh... A bad joke, but ontopic... $3 crack smokers...
A lot of *nix people get a bit mono-minded about Unix.
However the notion of a Unix monopoly is a bit.. odd...
It's like a "Car monopoly" most vehicals on the road are gas powered 4 wheel vehicals. Bikes, moter cycles and electric cars complete for marketshare.
But anyone can make a car....
And anyone can make a Unix like operating system.
We allmost are in a *nix monopoly as it is.
The alternitives to Microsoft Windows....
MacOs X, Linux, Solarus, BSD, SCO Unix, BeOS...
Unix, Unix based, Unix like or just runs Unix code.
This is how they survive. Become Unix and the code will come to you...
It's just easyer to stay alive when your a *nix system.
Write code for Unix and compile it on half a dosen systems then port to Windows... for the most part that will give you a larg marketshare.
In a market where it's hard to get develupers to port to your tiny platform (what happend to the days when you could bribe develupers to port to your new platform?) Being a *nix is a major advantage.
One standard is obnoxous but when no single enity controlls than standard it isn't dangerous. Just annoying.
We allready put up with annoying....
Diversity is cool...
I don't want a Unix PDA... I want a PDA using Geoworks or PalmOS or similer operating system...
I run Dos on an old computer at home...
However I'm not counter to a *nix "monopoly"... As annoying as it may be... it's no where near the same as one monolythic company telling you "This is where you will go today"
I don't actually exist.
Really?
Back in the '80s you sure did. It was (mostly) written in Bliss, and totally distributed on MicroFiche (i.e. you can't recompile it unless you retype it...not real assurance that the same source you got was used to compile the system).
I think the idea was that if the full bookshelf of manuals didn't cover it, the source could help out a bit.
There are lots of things I don't like about VMS, but lack of disclosure isn't one of them. Tons of disclosure come with VMS. Or at least 800 pounds of manuals. Seriously.
Sorry, but I have to disagree with you.
In out work environment we get crashes on both sides of the coin, but when the unix boxen crash it is a MESS. When the VMS go down, its generally a result of something else causing it, and is back up in no time. And the file versioning is AWESOME!!!! The poster above obviously hasn't ever used VMS to know what file versioning is. CVS could NEVER handle the load of the entire system. On the VMX boxen, each and every file has multiple versions. Ex.
STAJAMS.RPT;6
STAJAMS.RPT;5
STAJAMS.RPT;3
STAJAMS.RPT;2
STAJAMS.RPT;1
This is a blessing - for multiple reports ran througout the week, multiple EXE's, COM's, for doing bug testing. If you do a change to a file, it's saved as the newest highest version! If its wrong then just delete it, and its gone!
As far as source code developing goes we still use CVS, but there are many areas where File Versioning is still needed.
Ciao
Joe
I've seen lots of post with people stating the OS/2 source has large bits in x86 assembles, but just for fun why doesn't IBM open the source? If anything OS/2 would make a nice embedded OS or perhaps developing countries could use it?
Waste-not want-not
Trolls, it must be cool to be that bored.
Yes it is I, the nameless Seattle area developer that Paul Allen bamboozled into giving up an ingenious operating system for a paltry $800, only to sell it to IBM as (accursed) MS-DOS! Here today we shall reject the operating systems of the past 20 years, shed the shackles of so-called "Graphical User Interfaces" and reclaim QDOS! Avenge me! Avenge me!
These comments and opinions are mine and mine alone, although they shouldn't be.
What are you smoking? More importantly, where can I get some? Anyways, Unix systems can stay for more than mere months. I have no doubt that Unix could challenge VMS for uptime but Unix is not used in the same situations(periodically upgraded servers vs boxes burried under 9 meters of dirt).
Linux has IPC sir! If you want file versioning use CVS. What do you mean by calling standards?
You don't exist. Go away. --SysVinit Halt
Those supporting then end of communism have no choice but to support trading with the biggest country in the world.
This reminds me of an argument I had with a room-mate something like 8 years ago. My position was "we don't need to trade with them" to which he indignantly replied "they don't need to trade with us".
The bottom line? Both countries are big enough and have enough natural resources that neither really *needs* to trade with the other.
So, in the absence of any real pressing need, it all comes down to politics, and the politics of this deal suck. Wake up and smell the coffee! I have had too many experience with shoddily made goods from China. Ever hear of Peterbilt trucks? Best trucks made in America. Well, there was a fairly well known case where the brakes on a Peterbilt failed, seriously injuring some people. The cause? Mismarked bolts from China that were not really the SAE grade that they said they were. Peterbilt not at fault. Overseas suppliers at fault. This is just one small example.
Just try buying small steel items that are not made in China these days. Do we really want *more* of this??? What happens if a war breaks out? Remember Rosie the Riviter? If all are plants are in China, where is Rosie gonna rivet? It was the industrial might of the US that saved us from Hitler, and don't you forget it.
Egad! I've mentioned Hitler. Thread over. :)
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The Open Group recently released OpenMotif, with mention of "Open Source," and even the Raymond/Perens/Debian definition thereof. As well as mentioning that
The number of occurances of the word "Open" in the press release should be a good tip-off that it's marketing-speak time.
OpenVMS, which hearkens from the days of "Open Systems," is one of the cases of there being a fiction of openness. "Open Systems" are ones where the APIs are disclosed. And generally this means using some UNIX variation or some simulation thereof.
In the case of OpenVMS, they provide a POSIX-compatible API, as well as most of the components defined as part of the UNIX95 specification. You can pretend it's UNIX, if you hold your nose. (VMS aficionados would say the same thing, but mean something else... :-) )
With OpenVMS, you can probably compile some POSIX C code, and perhaps run some UNIX shell scripts. That's what "Open" means, in this case.
You decidedly don't get source code to the system.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
find -mtime 1 -name '*.html' -exec grep -i text \;
Nope this isn't correct.
It is case-senstive for *.html
The syntax is incorrect for find - you need '{}' to specify the file, and need to specific the starting directory
You need to specify /dev/null as a parameter to grep, or it won't print out the filename it found the text in (this is the only portable way to do it)
jackass? It's unreasonable to assume that there will be capital letters in html UNLESS YOUR FILESYSTEM LIKES TO YELL AT YOU.
There could very well be capital letters in *.html, for example, if you transferred the files from Windows to the Unix machine. The point is, Unix cares, and is too broken to realize that *.HTML is the same as *.html, without extra coddling and hand-holding from the user, whereas VMS knows this from the get-go.
It would be nice to see IBM open-source-ify OS/2... As long as they aren't making any money off of it, why should they care? And someone might pick up the support ball from them...
Manufacturing. Merely as an example. We currently use VMS to handle an entire warehouse. Everything from automated forklifts, to temperature controlled areas, to 100 ft cranes, to weighing of material. For us a move from VMS to UNIX (any form) would cost millions and take a long time. A real long time. And personally I couldn't gaurentee the same level of capabilities and/or reliability. (note though I have not been asked to look into the feasability)
Besides which it does have (by my experience) more reliability than our UNIX boxes. Our computer room got 'hot' one day. Real hot. The UNIX boxen all shut down. Not real nicely either. Almost lost data. The vaxen just kept right on going. Never missed a beat. Dispite a backup tape melting inside one. It really didn't care. Nor did we. There were more of them in a nice redundant rollover cluster. Just replaced the tape and did another backup.
-cpd
I think to clarify...
They want one source to answer questions.
They want one company to tell them whats wrong.
Back when companys were plugging 15 diffrent systems into one LAN (And when Microsoft Windows couldn't network so any LAN solution included erasing Windows) they found that created to many problems and it was better to sit on one standard than have obscure conflicts with 15 diffrent systems.
Unless your an expert in all 15 systems you really can not affort to have them. Better to stick to the systems your most knowladgable in.
Thats just the way it is today.. and Microsoft had nothing to do with it...
I don't actually exist.
Same site, other articles.
One is on the release of Solaris 8, which is about $20 for the unwarranted version, and NDS directory services.
This is kinda odd, tho -- although eDirectory will run on Solaris, W2K and Linux, check this:
> Novell is pursuing aggressive sales for
> eDirectory. It will give a 100-user licence free
> to customers buying Windows 2000 Server within
> 90 days of its release. Sun Solaris 7 buyers
> will be offered the same deal until 31 January.
What, no Linux? People actually buy Linux, ya know.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
>don't go dissing the Win95 process/thread model. It kicks UNIX's all over the place.
Unix has no single process/thread model.
Each system is unique.
This allows for some absolutly brilent designs and some increadably horrific systems...
For example some Unix systems let a program hijack the system.. The way some do in Win95....
And IBMs OS/2 had threading before 1995
I don't actually exist.
BTW, always nice to see a Python gag:)
>I purhcased OS/2 Warp and my friends thought I was nuts. "It's half an Operating System they said"
:)
Better half an OS (OS/2) Than no os at all (Windows)
My retort earnned me an early zelot lable.
I was using a SysV system at the time...
But I heard of this new hacker Os that got my intrest called Linux....
I don't actually exist.
If I was moderating that day, I would have just left it at its original +1. What really gets me is that two moderators thought it was worthy of their points.
;-)
Just FYI, but there was only one +1 moderation done to that comment. My karama is high enough that my posts get the "+1 Bonus" that many talk about.
Was that post worthy of the "+1 Bonus"? No. As I said, I expected to get moderated down, and posted accordingly. I can't be good all the time.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
What in Linux heaven or M$ hell do they mean? That they can ftp all customer stuff to the other platform, where it can be used? And that from a company, that used M$ tactics since before Bill Gates was born, only not that succesfully... And whom are they going to be friends with? Us, or them? The article leaves much to be enquired.
Stefan.
IBM invented noninteroperability as a marketing strategy long before Microsoft, but failed because Amdahl left them, knew reverse engineering and how the IBM machines were designed.
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
I am wondering: is there any likelihood/possibility that OS/2 code or techniques might end up in Linux code? I know IBM is unlikely to open-source OS/2, but with their recent involvement in Linux, are they paying any OS/2 developers to work on Linux? (If not, what exactly is the extent of their involvement with Linux?) Just a thought...
If they're not making any money off of it and they don't want it anyway, it would be nice if they just gave it away. That's what I would do. Of course, I'm not IBM. The FSF could do more with it than IBM wants to.
-JD
As I heard it, Compaq had just gotten a very very
big contract with the US military/NATO and part
of the contract deal was continued development
of VMS for at 15 years at the very minimum.
This was from the European sales manager at a
DECUS seminar, if that's any help.
K.
-
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
-DB
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I enjoyed stability, and the joys of true multitasking (not Win95 multithreading). No geek ever knocked the technical merits of OS/2 in my dorm. They just said "I like it too, but it just doesn't have the applications I need." Too bad for them -- OS/2 never ate my term papers. I enjoyed having a MS compatable OS that ran Win 16 apps better than Windows 3.1.
My OS/2 days are long gone -- as well as the 486 DX-2 40 that I ran it on. I'll remember OS/2 as a testament to the engineering talent of IBM and the ineptness of their Marketing team (OS/2 sponsored the superbowl -- didn't remember that? I'm not suprised).
I wonder if Linux would be as huge today if Windows had some stiffer (OS/2) competition. Maybe if Windows hadn't sucked donkey ass in such a hurry since then maybe we wouldn't have all these developers and user jumping ship to this labor-of-love called Linux.
I'll always remember OS/2 as a window killing piece of engineering bliss that just never blossomed. IBM: you suck.
One of the main disadvantages of the old VMS was that it was proprietry. So, It was not hacked and refined as much as the more open UNIX was. Is OpenVMS trully opensourced or is it just the name?
Unix didn't kill VMS. DEC killed VMS through stupid policies. And having used both extensively, and programmed for both extensively, I'll point out that VMS had/has technology that Unix systems (not to mention Linux) are still reaching for. Like clusters: talk to a VMS person sometime, tell him/her about "linux clusters", and then listen to her/him laugh at you. A properly set up VMS cluster is a thing of beauty, with capabilities and reliability orders of magnitude beyond anything available on Unix.
Then tell the VMS person about how we're getting different languages to work together. They will look at you in amazement, wondering why there isn't a standard calling convention that all the languages use.
Yes, DCL (the standard "shell" on VMS) is not the best possible interactive environment -- the unix shells are clearly superior. But DCL isn't VMS, anymore than bash is Unix. The VMS operating system is powerful and complete, and has solved problems the Unix people haven't gotten around to thinking about yet. The only thing that really sucks on VMS is the device:[directory]file.ext;version file names (although once you've lived with *real* (i.e. supported by the OS) file versioning, you miss it a *lot* when you do without).
And we Linux people our proud of our months of uptime, but VMS people measure uptimes and availability in *years*. Many of the production lines and processing plants (refineries, etc.) in the US and around the world are run by OpenVMS machines.
Don't get me wrong: I *like* Unix, and I'd much rather have a Unix box for my day-to-day programming environment (except that the DEC debugger blows away gdb) than VMS, but that's mostly because I'd much rather have bash than DCL. VMS definitely has its annoying quirks and faults. But slamming VMS based on a few weeks use of DCL and not liking the syntax is just prejudice.