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Last Chance To Order A Vax
Thanks to deadbeef, who runs the greatest mailing list, for sending out the word from Compaq that the final order dates have been established for VAX systems. The final order date is Sept. 30, 2000 and final ship date Dec. 31, 2000. Limited supplies - first come, first serve!
The models listed are VAXstations (and MicroVAXes) not the VAX 4000. These are the smallish SCSI based systems...not the 4' rack machines.
These 3100 are substantially faster than the ones from '89. For example, my MicroVAX 3100/90 is rated at 25VUPs vs 3.8 for a MicroVAX 3100/38.
We still run a VAX 4000 (running VMS 5.5-2) and have several smaller machines running VMS 6.1. They are incredible machines...make PCs look like toys. They don't build 'em like they used to.
Maybe I'll fire up my MicroVAX II on Sept 30 for a rather noisy memorial...
do you think this ten node cluster would fit into my Residence room?
I doubt it.
Per a handful of email requests, I've put some snapshots online. Enjoy.
InitZero
but that's just because it's interpreted.
I personally used a compiler for it.
I didn't know there also was an interpreter.
I also played with an MSDOS DiBOL compiler that worked pefectly.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
After all, where would UNIX be today if there hadn't been a VAX-11/780 around just daring someone to port UNIX to it?
Unix would probably have done just fine without the appearance of the VAX, because it was already running on PDP-11/34 and higher models prior to that, in Versions 6 and 7 towards the end of the 70's. What might never have been born without the VAX is BSD Unix, which led the way towards fully paged VMs (V7 just swapped whole segments).
However, there's no doubt that the competition from Berkeley made sure that AT&T kept improving V7 in order not to lag behind BSD, and so System 3 and System V became great systems largely as a result of the existence of the VAX as the platform for BSD development.
This was the start of Free Software in the operating system area: the upstart Berkeley community started from nothing (well, I guess they eyeballed V7) and then rapidly overtook the proprietary "official Unix" from AT&T. However, AT&T weren't the evil empire, because their source code was freely available to universities and was hacked into numerous different versions. So, right from the start of the 80's, there were already a lot of competing versions of Unix, and BSD on VAXen made the whole scene even more exciting.
Great days, very similar to today's emergence of Linux, with the big difference that there weren't any non-techies around getting in everyone's hair. Everyone in the community was a hacker, and those outside it simply weren't aware of what was going on at all.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I learnt to program for real on a Vax running VMS. It was a seriously unwelcoming environment at first, especially to someone used to an Atari ST with it's nice GEM desktop. But once I'd written a bunch of DCL scripts to make it a little friendlier, I found that VMS offered everything a budding programmer needs. An editor, compiler, debugger, profiler and help system. The only things I never got used to was the fact the editor didn't wrap like vi, and the help system wasn't as straightforward as using man pages.
One thing that always struck me as odd though was the terminals. They *always* looked really old - I've never seen a Vax terminal that didn't look yellowed with age. Was this how they came from the factory, or were they made from cheap plastic that went a funny colour really quick?
And if anyone knows where I can pick up a dirt-cheap VT100 terminal please let me know. A former colleague used to have one hanging of the serial port of his PC with emacs running on it!!!
Chris
The story times are posted in GMT. When this story was posted, it was the 16 in GMT, but still the 15th in the US.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
I fire it up a couple of times a year.
Do you use lighter fluid or gasoline?
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
A number of years ago, I was working for a Video Game Company that had split off of another video game company and which, sad to say, wasn't doing entirely well. Like many start-ups, financial problems were beginning to loom and I hadn't recieved a paycheck in a while. So it was with great reluctance that I started looking for a new job to start paying my own bills again.
I decided to go with a company called "Information Access Company", which was in need of a UNIX Administrator, as they were expanding into the UNIX market at their hosting company. Expanding from what? Well, from VAXes and VMS. Information Access Company had started as a consulting firm run by two ex-Digital developers who had worked on the VMS operating system, and had eventually been bought by Ziff-Davis and then sold to the Thomson Corporation (an Extremely Huge Company). The point of mentioning all that is that this company had gone through a lot of changes, but there was one shining point when it looked like it was going to be important indeed.
It seems that for a while AT&T was going to get into the online service buisness, to compete with Compuserve, AOL (this was early 90's when it still looked possible to) and MSN. The name of this online service was going to be Interchange, and to achieve this, they used VAXes for the vast majority of hardware. After putting millions into this project, AT&T decided to pull the plug and not go into that business (which is why you've never heard of Interchange) and the company turned its attention to other kinds of hosting.
How big a project was this? Well, it's been told to me by the people who were there that our building at one point had the largest non-government amount of VAX hardware in the United States, and therefore probably the world. This is a lot of VAX.
This project attracted some very talented people, people who really knew their butter when it came to VMS. Me, being 25 and cocky, thought of VMS as this clunky, horrible thing with terrible interfaces, no graphics, and was for all purposes dead. I was pretty much giving off that attitude in front of the old-timers, as I happily turned up Solaris Box after Solaris Box, snickering as I had 4 or 5 Ultra 2s in the same place as one of their massive tape drives.
Well, let me tell you, if you've never seen VMS and VAXes run by people who are true and honest wizards at it, you haven't seen the true power of that OS. Probably one of the most impressive things about VMS that I saw was their Clustering, which is just starting to make appearances in UNIX and Linux and the like. In VMS, the Clustering was True; that is, you literately had multiple machines that were, for all purposes the same machine, down to the hardware, doing the same work, and you could take individual machines down for servicing while leaving the others up, and the customers would never know. The whole setup would just deal with it. That's an easy one off the top of my head, but there's many magical things I saw the wizards accomplish. I quickly learned to focus on what I knew, and not just fly with my Grand Opinions off the top of my head. Thank goodness I learned it back THEN.
So, you think that eventually they threw out all their VAXes and the company just runs Pentium 800mHz rackmounts? Why, no, in fact. In fact, a lot of VAXes are still in use at this facility, and an on-site tech from Compaq/Digital continues to work there full time maintaining the boxes via a contract with Compaq. Many of the wizards have left but in some cases work for companies that still host at that facility, working on VMS.
VMS has a hell of a learning curve, but like many things in life, witnessing people who are at the top of that learning curve was magic itself.
Here's some files from my site, textfiles.com, that give a little history or at least humor (and therefore a feeling for them) about VAX, VMS, and Digital:
VMS Hacking Files
VAXOLOGY: A Poem about Vaxes
Alice in DIGITALand
God Logs Into his Vax
And the Ultimate VAX War Story.
If you're only in the mood to read one file, read that last one.
There's other classic VAX/VMS files on textfiles.com, including the VAX TREK series; I'll be sure to get them to an easy to find place very soon.
ALL HAIL THE VAX!
Why on earth would I do that when I can have REAL clustering via VMS? Silly, silly person, go away.
I don't know about their old stuff, but their new stuff sux!
Atex was the best publishing system in the world through the mid-80s. Unfortunately, they lost sight of the ball. Instead of scrapping the J11 base, they insisted on building on top of it. All their old time programmers (who were damn good) left the company to spinoffs. (XyWrite was probably the best of them, by the way. Still a top wordprocessor.)
Same goes for the other American publishing system companies. Europe, who bit the bullet and went fully-paginated in the late 80s and early 90s jumpped way ahead.
Fast to Atex means when we get to it, usually sometimes next week.
That's normal. Same for CCI. Same for SII. Same for DTI.
We had to spend the money because our SII system couldn't be made Y2K compliant.
We blew a load of cash to upgrade Atex knowing that we would be throwing it away this August. That extra eight months cost us big.
As for SII, we're using that, too. Editorial uses CCI. Classified uses SII. I feel your pain.
On top of two new system installs, we're doing web width reduction and a full redesign.
I never would have guessed Slashdot would have had this many newspaper folks hanging around. Of course, everyone else considers this thread off-topic. Which it probably is.
InitZero
I assume the second sentence is joking; the first Sequent machines (Balance) were NS32K-based, as were Encore's first machines. Sequent switched to 386's for the Symmetry machines - I forget what Encore did.
There was also a PC532, which was a home-brew NS32532 design for which there's a NetBSD port.
I seem to recall an old story about VMS vs Unix...
It seems that, once upon a time, these folks had a problem with their memory. Under VMS, the memory worked fine. Under UNIX, the system crashed randomly and unpredictably. The hardware was unchanged. Only the software, the OS, was altered.
The problem was eventually traced back to the RAM itself. It seems that, INSIDE the memory chips, the refresh pin had NOT been connected up.
DRAM is based around small capacitors. These capacitors lose their charge over time, so they require periodic refreshing. Normally, the refresh period is measured in milliseconds. But, upon experimentation, it was discovered that these RAM chips could last for up to a second or two between refreshes.
Now, refreshing could occur in one of two ways. It could be explicitly done through the refresh pin. Or you could access the memory, which would refresh a subset of that RAM. (The entire row, column, whatever...) This was a side effect of reading the memory value, which erased the capacitance charge, and caused it to be reset through a process internal to the RAM chip as part of the read cycle.
VMS, in all its glory, accessed all the memory frequently enough to keep it refreshed.
UNIX did not.
Bug. Feature. You decide.
About 5 years ago a friend checked, and DEC was still selling the (in)famious PDP11!
Now if this is just a few models, I'm not too worried, but if this is the entire VAX line, Compaq is in trouble - they just killed any chance of being the next DEC. Unlike the PC world, DEC supported their old stuff forever.
Anybody catch the VAXBar link? I *want* one of these!
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Alas, the VAX 4000 is considerably smaller than the 11/780, but maybe we could still get a drink or two inside... {grin}
alone or in pairs,
rolls over your neighbors dog.
Its great for a hack,
it fits in a rack, (a big one)
its VAX, VAX, VAX.
Its VAAAX, its VAAAX,
its big, its heavy, its wood (well not really)
it VAAAX, its VAAAX, its better than bad, its good
Everyone wants a VAX (not really again)
You're gonna love it VAX (from Compaq)
Sorry, couldn't resist....
-- A computer without COBOL and Fortran is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup and mustard
Run your own VAX at home for fun and profit. Learn how here!
While it's true that VAX and VMS have gone together for a long time, everyone seems to forget that Unix ran on VAX machines in days of old. Thus the phrase "a VAX account" doesn't actually mean much...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
The hardware, while slowish by todays standards, is solid. I've got an RA82 (623M SDI disk) that has 14" platters and a serial port on the front so you can do diagnostics on the drive itself with a dumb terminal.
The OS (usually VMS) is very robust and does stuff that other OSes are just now getting to: clustering. Don't give me that beowulf crap, I want VMS-style clustering for linux. Disks could be shared between nodes (at the block level) as well as process queues.
Don't get me wrong, Linux is very cool. I love it and use it as my primary platform, but I have a soft spot for VMS...
I run NetBSD on my MicroVAX II (Don't let the name confuse you: its in a 4' tall enclosure) and for being slower than the original VAX (from 77), its quite usable.
The title is an allusion to the game Wolfenstein 3D but I remember this excellent editor with its learning features. :-)
I remember once having to modify a huge program (in DiBOL, a cool language, hybrid between Basic and C) and recording a small macro that did the whole thing instantaneously...
I also loved their terminal : conected to to servers at once, one could copy from one console to the other a very efficient nd intuitive way... of course, now with X-like interface this sounds silly but then, years ago, it was revolutionary onan X-less machine.
God bless Digital
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
How doth the VAX's C compiler
Imrove its object code.
And even as we speak does it
Increase the system load.
How patiently it seems to run
And spit out error flags.
While users, with frustration,
Tear all their clothes to rags.
Or better yet,
Speak roughly to your little VAX,
And boot it when it crashes;
It knows that one cannot relax
Because the paging thrashes!
Wow! Wow! Wow!
I speak severely to my VAX,
And boot it when it crashes;
In spite of all my favorite hacks
My jobs it always thrashes!
Wow! Wow! Wow!
Yes, I spend too much time running "fortune."
isn't Atex the firm which was sued for their non ergonomic keyboard?
Yes. In fact, Atex was hit so hard, they decided to stop producing keyboards. I believe it was the first ergo case of this kind.
When Atex stopped making keyboards, a company calling itself Xeta started. Xeta is Atex backwards.
InitZero
Many of the internal concepts of VMS (such as the scheduler and priority system, deferred and asynchronous procedure calls, interrupt handling, and memory layout) were made part of Windows NT, probably due to the fact that Dave Cutler, the chief architect of Windows NT, had previously done VMS for DEC, and brought a bunch of ex-VMS people with him when he jumped to M$. (There's a longer story behind this, you can get it here.)
I n fact, there's a joke that you can tell that NT follows VMS by just adding one to each letter of "VMS" - you get "WNT," or "Windows NT." (This is similar to the "HAL vs. IBM" joke that people pointed out around the time of 2001: A Space Odyssey.)
Of course, then M$ had to go crapping up the design, as they usually do...but that's hardly VMS' fault :-). And, as the referenced aticle will show, some of NT's better-known misfeatures, such as the Registry, were "backported" to VMS later...dunno what that says about DEC/Compaq...
Eric
--
Be who you are...and be it in style!
I checked into playing with an AS/400 a few months back, but was stymied by the near-vertical learning curve. Seems like you need to understand the whole complex system to write a 'hello world' program.
I'd like to try again someday, though, because I admire the quality and stability of the system.
D
----
Btw, does anyone still use VMS in new applications anymore? and what other architectures does it run on? Dabbled with it in college, because we received both a unix and a VMS shell account, but unix and I hit it off, and I never really used VMS.
----------------------
Message: One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX?
Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines. And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s.
It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming.
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, President of DEC, 1984
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
...QBus. Lots of people (too many, if you ask me) still relied on proprietary QBus cards for embedded applications and such. Lots of these cards only worked on certain revs of VMS, which is why the 3 they still sell all say "VMS 5.5-2 compatible" (when the current release is 7.2-1). That's the only thing keeping a lot of those older VAX shops from moving completely to Alpha. Those that didn't have weird legacy hardware requirements probably already went to VMS on Alpha a long time ago. (I did the port for the VMS shop I used to work for about 4 years ago) All of the non-QBus VAXes have been dead for a while now. I've got 6 VAXstations at home, one of which has VMS 6.2 on it. It's still a neat system to play with. One of the others has NetBSD/VAX on it. (Some progress is being made with Linux on the VAX, but NetBSD runs on more VAX models at this point.) The other 4 are going up on eBay one of these days when I get around to it...
Customers snapped up new VAX systems very quickly, especially the higher-end models. What they were left with was the VAX 4000 series, but now, the chips for those have run out too, so it's time to pull the plug.
VAX systems are still widely used within "the company formerly known as DEC" - our compiler development group uses a VAXcluster as its central server (of course, we have many Alpha systems as well.) Myself, I'm the entire "VAX Fortran project", though there hasn't been much to do there in the past few years.
I know that VAX systems are still popular with customers too - many of them don't need the added performance of Alpha and find that VAX "just works" for them. Of course, OpenVMS continues to support VAX systems with new releases.
Steve Lionel
>I have never seen a VAX hang nor being halted for any reason.
Ahh, memories. While at Purdue Cal 82-86 I worked as a studen lab asst. We had an 11/780 that had far too many users on it, probably at least 80 during the day, maxed 120 at night when all the night-class crowd shuffled down to do their assignments. It stood up pretty well until our moron grad student DB instructor decided to us UW-RIM to teach relational.
That killed it. It would hang or crash every night. We had to institute a policy of no more than 4 DB students running their project at a time to keep the poor thing on its feet.
I did love VMS, though. Still have a swiped VT-100 terminal and a set of VMS manuals in my garage somewhere. Sorry to see the line come to an end.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
The only Vax I want to save is the famous moskvax . I saw it when it was first unveiled.
It really sucks that Ken Olson couldn't figure out what Cuttler was telling him. It also sucks that Digital couldn't figure out how to sell the great OS that they had. VMS ran well in an 8MB workstation long before NT was a pipe dream. It still runs faster, in less space, more reliably than the commercial Unices, and has far more capability than Linux (sorry, but VMS has been clustering commercially for more than a decade, and had a journaling file system more than five years ago).
Yet another example of superior technology getting toasted by poor marketing and sales. Sigh...
The "public" system -ucscb- was an old PDP/10 (with magnetic core memory) had achieved the highest Unix load numbers I had seen up to this point. They would not allow screen-graphic games (like rogue, etc.) to be played until after 6pm. Every night just after 6pm, the load numbers would shoot up to 20-30 (meaning, supposedly, the equivalent of 20-30 people using the full power of the computer at the same time, means the 100 or so users logged on were running serious CPU hogs)! They eventually replaced this machine with a 68020 based mini-computer (they had no funds to buy a new public system, but figured out the reduced maintenance costs would break-even in less than a year).
The highest real world load numbers I ever saw came from an undergrad class. It was some type of intro to data algorithms class, and the TA?s wanted to make the class interesting. They introduced the concept of Alpha-Beta pruning, a technique used for game AI. They supplied an Othello program, with vital parts of the AI removed. The idea was that the students would rewrite the AI. Great concept, but they did not quite realize what they were letting loose.
This was a traditional UC big undergrad class ? around 220 people. They were assigned 3 VAX 11/750 (about half the speed of the classic 11/780). Picture 70 people per VAX, compiling 3000 line C programs at the same time. I personally saw load numbers of 60, and was told it hit a peak of 79. It took vi about 10 minutes to open a file, and a simple line down (pressing the ?j? key) took over a minute. Needless to say, quite a few people never managed to finish that project!
Friends, Geeks, Hackerdom!
Lend me your bandwidth!
I come to bury VAX, not praise it.
The Evil of a platform lives after it.
The good oft is interred with the decommissioned hardware.
So let it be with VAX.
-Ouija- poke 53280,11:poke 53281,12
> Had a VAX account once a long time back, but I'd already seen Unix and wasn't impressed.
I presume you're actually comparing VMS to Unix, rather than the VAX.
I suspect that most people, including myself, use what they saw first as the benchmark for normality among computer systems.
Unlike you, I saw VMS before I saw Unix, and also unlike you, I still think the VMS way is superior in many regards.
If VMS were free, Free, ran on commodity hardware, and had an "agressive mindshare" like Linux does, I would probably be using it instead. It truly has some nifty features.
(Damn! There went my hard earned reputation as a Linux bigot.)
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
As a person who has spent many all-nighters coding away in ASM without a macro-assembler, CISC does not look too bad.
LOL. Ah, yes. I remember, from my days at Unnamed U., that the VAX they still had in use as a student machine had an assembler instruction to evaluate an arbitrary length polynomial equation. Now that's what I call an instruction set!
We also had a MicroVAX in the department I worked as an admin from time to time. The thing was a true crawling horror, but we kept it around because one old guy refused to give it up. Then one day, it actually caught on fire. Said old guy was still logged into it remotely (without problems!) when we killed the power to stop the smoke. After that, though, it never booted again.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
On August 25, 2000, the company I work for is going to be turning off its ten-node clustered PDP-11 (M-11 upgraded!). This computer system (Atex -- a newspaper publishing system also used by the Supreme Court) was installed in 1972 and still works like a charm.
At the height of production, we had over 240 users on the system. All with just 40 meg of memory (four meg in each of the ten nodes; I can't boot a single-user instance of NT in just 40 meg). I've been working on this system for five years and it's older than I am. In the last eleven years, we've not had a single minute of unscheduled down time that has had a production impact.
In order to replace Atex, we bought three 12-processor RS/6000 S7As with 10 gig of RAM between them running AIX and 350 PCs running NT for the client side.
Our Atex system produced a daily newspaper (okay, maybe there were some reporters helping out, too) for 28 years. We expect we will have to replace the new system in five years.
They sure don't make machines like they used to. If you every have an opportunity to work on some of these systems, take it. You will learn a great deal.
InitZero
(If anyone knows of a good home for these ten nodes and related equipment, drop me email. Paying customers would be our first choice. Musuems are number two. Private citizens with more money than brains always welcome. {grin})
At the University of Kansas, they had to install a furnice in the computer center after they got rid of their old VAXen and replaced them with Alpha stations. They used to use the excess heat from the VAXen to heat the building, but had to come up with an alternative heating source when those machines were decomissioned.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Read my lips
RFC1925
Seems by the lack of comments that these machines really have seen their day. I've never used one, and wouldn't know what to type if i did see one.
What's funny is that in the late 1980s, UNIX had really had it's day too. You'd frequently see articles about how UNIX was a relic from fifteen years ago, and how it was being replaced by smaller, more lightweight operating systems. That UNIX was revived is as incredible as if the VAX had become the next Commodore 64.
Hmmm, wonder if that was intentional or unconscious.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
VAX indeed grew out of PDP-11. In the early 80's, the PDP line was struggling with its 16-bit address space. When Digital went to design the "next generation", they made the then-bold move of going to a 32-bit system with true virtual memory rather than a 24-bit one. VAX stood for "virtual address extension" according to the DEC marketing stuff I heard once.
However, the 68K architecture had little to do with VAX. As a matter of fact, when I was part of a group in the year *cough* *cough* porting from VAX to 68K machines, one constant nuisance was the difference in byte order ("big-endian" vs. "little-endian").
The chip really based on the VAX was the National Semiconductor 32016 and 32032. I'm not sure that chip ever made it out of test marketing.
We now return you to the 21st century....
One thing that should be said is that the failure of the Vax line was a momument to the incompetance of Ken Olsen. His arrogance as to the future of the pc and his clueless marketing approach doomed Digital and the Vax line.
Circa 1989-96. Ran Ultrix 3.2 on it. Other than innumerable problems with the serial port servers and terminal connections it ran like a Russian truck. I don't think we rebooted it for other than maintenance one time, ever. Never Ever. It was a single purpose machine hosting one clinical nursing application. Unfortunately the user base was a group of overworked abused nurses who would come into work in the morning and promptly hose getty to their terminal and then tell their manager (who they hated) that the the system was down. They also put in help desk calls to put more paper in the printer. But on it's own the machine was one stable MoFo.
What sort of frame rate we can get with Quake 3 and how it compares to a tbird 1ghz with a Geforce ultra.
Seems by the lack of comments that these machines really have seen their day. I've never used one, and wouldn't know what to type if i did see one.
A bit of a shame but on the other hand it's not at all.
VAXen are incredible pieces of hardware. I own an old VAX Server 4000-200. (roughly equivalent to a 386DX33, 16Mb RAM) Now that everybody have linux at home, having a VAX at home is still very uncommon. The boot sequence in itself is a nice show. Altrough not very usefull to date women... ("Did you want to come home to see my VAX booting ?") Unfortunately, VMS is way too cryptic for me, but courageous folks are working hard to port NetBSD to VAX architecture. Now I can netboot NetBSD on the VAX, but the internal DSSI disks support is still lacking.
thats the best solution for em - doorstops. while we're at it can we obsolete AS/400s as well ? I've used both and both of em (VMS & OS/400) have to be the most damn unfriendly OSes to use - EVER. hey ibm - how bout dumping those midrange machines and replacing em with AIX boxen ? Or better yet - offer trade ups for old VAXen to alphas and AS/400s to S/390s.
And, elsewhere in this thread, someone said the VAX was the model for 386 protected mode.
I don't know for sure, but in both cases I wonder if the people are making statements based on a cursory reading of history rather than actual historical documents (or people, such as the original architects)?
Reason being, before the 68K, aka 68000, there was the 68C, aka 6800, which predated the VAX.
I'd guess that the 6800 was strongly influenced by the PDP-11, which also influenced the VAX, and that the 68000 was strongly influenced by the 6800, probably moreso than by the VAX.
(Historical note: a friend of mine built a homebrew 6800 system, later permanently (thank God ;-) borrowing my KSR-33 teletype with built-in acoustic coupler to serve as a console, no later than early 1977, before VAXen were on the market AFAIK.)
Similarly, the 386 protected mode could have been largely inspired by the VAX.
But, given its obvious ISA-level relationship to Pr1me and older Honeywell hardware (a relationship that predated the VAX as well), and the fact that Pr1mes had already evolved a ring-protection system to mimic another (old) Honeywell line (the computers designed for Multics, not the 516 or whatever the Pr1me 200 was built to emulate)...
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
Of course it runs NetBSD!
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is an oft heard lie. At no time did Compaq announce or even float a plan past customers that OpenVMS was to be dropped.
One of the big Analyst firms (Gartner?) said that they expected Compaq to stop new development on OpenVMS by the end of 2001, which has always been denied by Compaq (Compaq has published several revisions of a rolling 5-year development plan for OpenVMS since this prediction).
It's probably just FUD from competitors who want to get into those Compaq OpenVMS shops with their wares.
If you look at it, it doesn't make any sense at all from a business standpoint. Compaq makes $4 Billion a year from AlphaServer sales and sales of software/services/licensing to support said sales (this includes Tru64 Unix and OpenVMS). I'm not clear on the breakdowns, but OpenVMS brings in more than Tru64, I think.
This is all very high margin stuff. Nobody in their right mind would retire this cash cow.
-Jordan Henderson
So farewell then,
good old vax.
You were powerfull in your day,
but finally unix held sway,
or was it the pc l.a.n.,
that did you in,
I was never quite sure.
Just like Ozymandias in the EDT tutorial,
this collosal wreck will now DECay,
Never mind.
EJ Thribb, 17 and three quarters.
"You can catch flies till the cows come home, but wasps are a totally different kettle of fish."
At least at Texas A&M. The physics dept had a VAX 11/780 (1 MHz!) and up to 10 simultaneous users. My first real job was graphics programming for the dept. in FORTRAN-- what a waste of money I was... They put me in the room with the printer, probably just to make me quit.
When the 11/780 came out, it made CG possible (without getting 1 grant per image)-- look at the SIGGRAPH proceedings before and then after 1982 or 3.
However, VMS is not dead, so there really is a transition to new hardware with the same software infrastructure. If you're a VAX shop, buy an Alpha box, put OpenVMS on, and you're good to go.
On the desktop, a comparison could be Apple ditching 68K for PPC-you can't buy anymore 680x0 boxen, but you can certainly still buy MacOS.
--Calum
With heating oil prices expected to double or more this winter in New England, you might be better off sitting by the soft, warm glow of a Vax on a cold winter night. Maybe running Scicards or something. Would I have to put in a raised floor?
VMS was quite an outstanding OS. /bin/sh. It was credible.
OK, not really user friendly, but once mastered it really kicked ass and I have never seen a VAX hang nor being halted for any reason.
If VMS now evokes WNT (do a right-rot1 and you'll see) that inherited its kernel architecture, there is, IMHO, a system that obviously inherited its shell grammar from VMS : RiscOS.
As The StrongARM also inherited from the Alpha chip, it is obvious that Acorn Workstations were influenced by Digital (of course, this exageration is purely IMHO).
This is a good thing for them as Acorns are usually renowned for their ease of use.
At least one company understood Digital's radically new (in these times) technical approach and extended it to home computing.
BTW, a Unix freak with whom I worked on a VAX4000 had completely customized his shell to look like Unix's
Long live, Digital, you'll stay in my heart.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.