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

Re: Reasons to use VMS

[Black Parrot]

> but is OpenVMS really good for anything _new_ today?

The answer to your question is cultural rather than technical. VMS is a superb OS, but it is now viewed as déclassé in most circles, so it only has a thin slice of mindshare. That's not really any more a reflection on it than the thin slice of mindshare given to some very excellent programming languages.

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.

Re:Reasons to use VMS

[Trolling4Dollars]

Where I work, we use VMS. Sadly it's going away. But, I do have some really cool storie that my boss passed along to me about his experiences with VMS back in the 80s. He worked at a bank where they had a support group for the two different systems they supported. There was the Wang support group and the VMS support group. The Wang support group was made up of 100+ people who were on call 24/7 and were generally in the offices. The VMS support group was... 1 person. Also on call 24/7, but only ever needed to be there during normal work hours becasuse the system "just worked". I've seen the same thing where I work now. We are moving to HP's Unix and most of the VMS guys are dreading it. Even though I love UNIX and Linux, I have to say that VMS is a lot heartier and very easy to support. To be honest, if DEC/Compaq/HP had been smart, they could have had a great competitor to Windows in the server market if they kept the GUI up to date. Hopefully, someone will port Gnome to it and get it to have a bit more of a modern feel for the server monkeys.