First OpenVMS Boot On IA64

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!"

Comments

Reasons to use VMS

[palfreman]

I used OpenVMS a bit at my universty, and I have to say I never really got into it - getting my solaris account was a great day! I can understand people wanting to maintain legacy apps (big purchasing systems maybe?) but is OpenVMS really good for anything _new_ today? Does it have any real particular advantages that mean you would want to use it for reasons other that "we've already got a stack of Alphas this high on it and gonna keep using it until forever"?

Re: Reasons to use VMS

[shess]

I more than half wish the OSS revolution had centered around VMS rather than UNIX. There's not the slightest reason we couldn't be doing all the things we do under VMS... except the "price architecture". Put a free+open version on x86 and Linux might have some hot competition.

Back in the 80's I had access to our campus VMS machine, and to the Unix box. I think the big difference was that the VMS machine very much restricted what I could do, the Unix machine didn't. So, I spent more time on the Unix machine. This probably has two root causes: VMS gave the admin more ability to control users, and VMS was more expensive to run than Unix in terms of hardware and whatnot (so the Unix admin didn't care as much).

As mentioned elsewhere, this is certainly a "culture" issue. But VMS seemed to enable a culture of control, while Unix enabled more anarchy. OSS software falls out of anarchy.

Oh Alpha, where art though?

[l33t-gu3lph1t3]

Your first iteration was amazing. Your second version was equally amazing. AMD's own successes with the K7 architecture are owed mostly to you. Your latest golden baby was thrown in the garbage because it scared the other babies. Even though no one wants to know, your EV7 is *STILL* the premiere big iron architecture in this day and age. What would have been your crowning jewel was aborted and your womb replaced by something Intel Inside. EV8, you would've been an engineering and design marvel, something that would've taken YEARS to beat. And now, poor DEC Alpha team, where are you? Fragments of your EV7/6 team are higher-ups at AMD, giving the desktop underdog a chance, and the rest of you is at work at Intel/HP, genetically engineering something something truly EPIC, that sadly, only even a mother could love...assuming the mother eventually gives birth to acceptably talented offspring. Oh, whither art thou, Alpha?

Re:No congratulations for selling out...

[nutznboltz]

end of the line for the DEC tradition of excellence that began with the PDP-10.

But the PDP-6 had the same 36-bit architechture as the PDP-10.

HP has done nothing innovative for computing in the last decade.

Innovations didn't save DEC from its stupid managment.

HP kow-towing to Intel, instead of commercializing a superior architecture.

Well, it sux but it's not going to kill them any time soon. I wish it would kill them but USA is about Intel and MS and other mediocraties.

HP wants to be in bed with Intel. HP needs to keep OpenVMS only alive enough to avoid jilting its inherited customer base. The same is true with porting HP-UX to the Itanic. Linux on the Itanic is HP's real server "solution". They are getting into Linux clustering in a major way.

Re: VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Waffle Iron]

And if he was speaking about 15 years ago, 2 MB might have been a very generous disk quota. I know of UNIX shops where you feel lucky to get 100MB even today.

Which just reinforces the parent rant. On a PC, that 100MB would cost ten cents. Maybe instead of rationing disk space, the sysadmins could save more money for the company by scavenging abandoned half-full cups of coffee in the break room and pouring them back into the coffee pots.

Re:Modern VMS applications?

[sql*kitten]

I know it's present in some legacy systems, and supported by Compaq for that reason. But why would we want VMS on new hardware? What new stuff runs on VMS these days?

You do know that Unix hails from 1970 and VMS from 1978 don't you? It always amazes me when Unix kiddies don't seem to realize that VMS is actually more modern.

People use VMS when scalability and reliability matter. It's perhaps 15 years ahead of Unix for that (i.e. VMS clusters 15 years ago are where Unix clusters are now). You can do useful stuff like add a node to a cluster, migrate the applications onto it, shut down the original node, and the users won't even notice a gap in application availability. Add to that real ACLs and a versionning, journalled filesystem (things that modern Unix has only gotten in the last few years), and very fine-grained tunability, for example you can set the working set size per process and configure the system to assign different priorities to programs or users at different times. And DECnet is smart enough to authenticate user at the packet level, inherently more secure than TCP/IP.

Essentially, VMS died because DEC was run by engineers who thought that a good product would sell itself, whereas Sun et al were smart enough to hire marketers by the boatload.