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First OpenVMS Boot On IA64

Posted by chrisd on from the hp-isn't-so-bad-I-guess dept.

vaxzilla writes "At 3:31pm EST on Friday, January 31st, 2003, OpenVMS for the Intel IA64 architecture successfully booted and ran a DIR command. The Intel Itanium family of processors is the third architecture supported by OpenVMS in its 25 year history. Originally it ran on Digital Equipment Corporation VAX systems; in the early 1990s, support was added for the DEC Alpha processors. Following the acquisition of DEC by Compaq, and more recently Compaq by HP, the Itanium and Itanium2 port of OpenVMS is now being undertaken by HP. Congratulations on a job well done to the folks at ZK03 in Nashua, NH!"

1 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. Re:VMS is the worst OS ever. by Syre · · Score: 5, Informative

    From the perspective of a user in a mis-managed VMS environment, I can understand your sentiment, but it was your sysadmins who were at fault, not VMS.

    The fact that VMS HAS options which allow extremely fine-grained selection of user privs is a positive thing about the OS. VMS also had all kinds of login security years (break-in detection and evasion) before other systems, and was designated "trusted" quite early on.

    VMS could be mismanaged so that it would crash, if ALL logging options were enabled. But that doesn't make it bad for it to have had so many different logging options.

    Diskquotas weren't even enabled by default when I was using VMS. You *could* enable them (and obviously your silly sysadmins both enabled them and put very low limits on you), but you never had to.

    VMS is a very flexible tool, and tools can be made to do lots of things, some good, some bad.

    By the way, even now there aren't that many systems with the availability and redundancy VMS clusters had in 1985 (automatic failover from one machine to another, separate shared disk controllers, etc. etc.).

    Finally VAX/VMS virtual memory worked better than any other such system I've seen. You could actually let things page and they didn't slow down much, since the paging was so intelligent.

    *sigh* anyway, that was all a long time ago. I haven't used VMS professionally since 1992 or so...