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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!
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!
Alas, the VAX 4000 is considerably smaller than the 11/780, but maybe we could still get a drink or two inside... {grin}
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
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})
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