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

well...

[Anonymous Coward]

thank god for that!

Give me

[Anonymous Coward]

A bloody woobler bruz.

Wow!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

An itanium based platform can produce a listing of files!!!!

This is truly a breakthrough. Intel is waay ahead in computing than companies like Nike or Coca Cola.

Re:Wow!!!

[Zork the Almighty]

Future - Here We Come !

Re:Wow!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, and by the same regard OpenBeOS is finished.

Re:Wow!!!

[MrLint]

woah baby now i can set def [...] faster then ever!

Re:Wow!!!

[fussman]

An itanium based platform can produce a listing of files!!!!

Well, maybe if they make a decent network device driver for it, it could serve as an index of shared files we are all crazy about (my personal mp3 fetishes are rare Green Day mp3s, and obscure prank phone calls).

Re:Wow!!!

[gustar]

Rather then mocking the post perhaps you should be appreciative of the steady success of an operating system that has survived and prospered for over a quarter of a century.

OpenVMS has embraced and innovated concepts like clustering and high availability long before they came into vogue amongst the Unix world. It may not be everyone's idea of a "sexy" operating system but it has gotten the job done for quite some time now.

Re:Wow!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm hoping you know this, given your joke, but the standard standard firts hurdle for when an OS is ported to a new architecture is when it can boot and run a simple command without error. File listing is one of the simplest so it became the hello world example.

Re:Wow!!!

[glenmark]

Not really. IA64 performance would first need to catch up to that of the Alpha EV7.

Now if only I could remember what time and date I had guessed for my entry in HP OpenVMS boot contest...

Re:Wow!!!

[RAMMS EIN]

``Intel is waay ahead in computing than companies like Nike or Coca Cola.''
Now wait just a minute. Where would Intel be without the Coca Cola to fuel the programmers?

Re:Wow!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok,

Heres a chip, heres the source code. No compiler, no linker. YOU make it do a "DIR"

Jerk.

Re:Wow!!!

[msbsod]

... and while OpenVMS has gotten the job done for quite some time now, unix has not and people started to fix unix design flaws 10 years before OpenVMS was developed ...

fp???

[Anonymous Coward]

set def [first:post]

Re:fp???

[Anonymous Coward]

try

set def sys$firstpost

or

set def $_first:[post]

In Soviet Russia...

[Anonymous Coward]

We're still running VMS too.

Re:In Soviet Russia...

[cryms0n]

Wouldn't that be:

VMS runs dir on YOU.

Re:In Soviet Russia...

[Anonymous Coward]

On the kremvax? The USSR may be dead, but nothing can kill VMS!

FP

[Anonymous Coward]

Fifth Post!!!

(What were you expecting??)

64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[unterderbrucke]

64 bit does not mean a thing. 99.99999999999999% of software today does NOT run on it, and the performance difference in mhz between 32 bit and 64 bit processors (especially in the north bridge) makes any performance gained by using 64 bit architecture negligible.

As usual, great tool for the server companies, crap for everyone else in the world.

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[Dave9876]

I'll be the first to say it. MHz don't mean jack.

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[moertle]

yeah, server companies benefit, but so do engineering and scientific institutions. some of my code runs faster on a 500 MHz Alpha than a 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 (with rambus memory)

Re: 64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[Black Parrot]

> 64 bit does not mean a thing. 99.99999999999999% of software today does NOT run on it, and the performance difference in mhz between 32 bit and 64 bit processors (especially in the north bridge) makes any performance gained by using 64 bit architecture negligible.

> As usual, great tool for the server companies, crap for everyone else in the world.

Also good for scientists who want to do lots of 64-bit FP math. Possibly others; let's make a list.

Would it help with graphics applications? RGBA x 16 bits each would be 64 BPP.

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[ctr2sprt]

Performance is not the reason to go to 64-bit. The reason is the 64-bit address space, which allows individual processes to access 2^64 bytes of memory as a contiguous region. The IA32 ("x86") has a kludge which lets a system have up to 64GB RAM, but each segment can still only reference 4GB at most. If your operating system happens to use a flat memory model, like Linux does, this limits each process to 4GB total.

4GB is still a lot by any standard, but the problem is that the kernel, for example, needs to have some of its structures appear in the process's address space. Shared libraries also need to be in each process's address space, even if it's in memory only once. Even better, you need to leave room for the heap to grow as well as for user-loaded entities (like dlopen()'ed shared objects). In practice, I understand the default restriction for Linux is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5GB per process, though you can increase that to 3GB with some libc tweaks. There are a few kernel patches to raise that limit further to 3.5GB, but that's the absolute ceiling (and you are sacrificing what may be important things, like SysV shared memory segments).

Even now, it's not uncommon to see gaming machines with 1GB RAM or more. Even small servers will often have 4GB RAM. In a few years, the number of "high-memory" systems is only going to increase as advances in technology continue to drive down the cost of RAM and drive up the requirements of software. This is especially the case as databases become more important and commonplace in the business world. Everyone uses them now, but we can expect to see them used more often, and in more diverse places, than in the past.

There is also a hope among many of us that Intel and AMD will use this opportunity to create good chips, not just cheap ones. They have the opportunity to fix a lot of the stupid design decisions Intel made 20 years ago and put together a modern, clean system. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this is going to happen (I don't think anyone at AMD has had an original idea in their entire lives, and Itanium is being designed by committee), but this is the hope. In short, we may not see any immediate performance gains, but in the long term, the design of the chips would enable faster improvements than we're getting with IA32s right now.

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[Anonymous Coward]

I can believe that. My father has some planetary simulation program that can simulate a spacecraft flying between n-bodies. Its all numerical integration. He has a 166Mhz 21064 (AXP-PCI 133; ie oem alpha motherboard) with 64MB of ram (33Mhz). He also has a 850Mhz Duron with 256MB of DDR-266. The program runs at about 1/3 the speed of the duron on the alpha -- but that's with GCC which doesn't generate overly optimal code for the Alpha processor.

Its says a lot for that old Alpha machine. I bet those new Alphas which I'm assuming operate at least at 1Ghz, would be able to leave a P4 3Ghz in the dust for floating-point operations.

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[palfreman]

If your operating system happens to use a flat memory model, like Linux does, this limits each process to 4GB total.

I thought it was Linux 2.2 that had the 4Gb memory limit? - I think it was 2Gb plus 2Gb actually, or 3 + 1. anyway, I'm pretty sure I've seen 64Gb as a compile option for 2.4 kernels, back when I used to use it (I got scared off around 2.4.11 and went onto FreeBSD 4.x)

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[yomegaman]

What's that got to do with 32/64 bit? It just means that the DEC fortran compiler generates fast, optimized code and g77 doesn't.

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[VoidEngineer]

I must disagree with you.

64 bit does not mean a thing.

It means something important to anybody who ever has to receive a CAT scan or a nMRI scan... VMS/VAX systems run nMRI and CAT scanners... They use 64 bit architecture during Fourier analysis...

99.99999999999999% of software today does NOT run on it

probably because 99% of software today is used for text and graphics processing; not for mission critical apps. that's kind of like saying that 99% of all driving accidents happen within 25 miles of home... well, geeze, 99% of all driving period occurs within 25 miles of home...

performance difference in mhz between 32 bit and 64 bit processors (especially in the north bridge) makes any performance gained by using 64 bit architecture negligible

I disagree with you. The difference between being able to handle 2^32 and 2^64 is worlds apart in performance. I suggest that you compare 16 bit computers, which didn't support true-color, full motion multimedia, and compare to 32 bit computers. They both support text editing; however, one supports WYSIWYG better than the other...

FYI, my day job involves running MRI scans on a VMS/VAX Gyroscan Intera workstation... This 64 bit architecture is the hottest stuff around, for somebody who works with a VMS/VAX workstation... here's why: MRI scanners work just like any other printer/scanner device, in terms of device drivers, and general operation. The difficulty is, because MRI looks at differential angular momentum of hydrogen atoms to obtain it's pictures, it's got to calculate a Fourier wave analysis on each atom it vibrates. Being able to run an algorithm with 64 bits means less data manipulation, higher resolution, faster scan times, and increased diagnostic imaging power to the medical doctors.

Anyhow, for those interested, there currently seems to be a big migration from VMS/VAX/Alpha solutions to Windows/Intel compatibility (for obvious reasons). Philips has introduced an InteraNT product into their Intera Gyroscan line, which runs the MRI scanner on a Windows NT platform, instead of the traditional VMS/VAX platform which they've been using for some time...

As usual, great tool for the server companies, crap for everyone else in the world.

This is slashdot... they cover stuff which is great for server companies, hospital radiology departments, nuclear power facilities, astronautical engineering groups, etc. etc. That's why we love it...

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[VAXman]

Yes you're correct with IA32 you're limited to 4GB per process. I wouldn't call it a "kludge"; basically you have 36 bits to specify a physical address in each PTE, but are still limited to 32 bit linear addressing. This means you can have 2^36 bytes of RAM, and processes can be spread out throughout that whole address space. I'd only consider it to be a kludge if there were "windows" or "partitions" and you could access 4GB of consecutive at once.

Note that this is completely transparent to the process. The OS is responsible for setting up paging. Note also that on a server you typically run a whole lot of processes anyways (e.g. a whole bunch of web server processes) so for most server applications I don't see it as a major limitation (big databases may be one problem)

Note also that theoretically that you could have system where the process could access more than 4GB of linear address space, if you set aside some region of linear address space for this purpose, and had a system call to update where this was going to. This is an ugly, ugly kludge, requires OS modification, and reminds of DOS style memory management but could be done (and would probably be cheaper than moving off of X86...)

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[pesc]

64 bit does not mean a thing. 99.99999999999999% of software today does NOT run on it.

Guess what, 100% of Alpha VMS software runs on 64-bit hardware. Because Alpha has been 64 bit for about ten years. 64-bittness is nothing new here...

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[Kadagan AU]

Actually, I think that Alphas aren't near 1GHz yet. The fastest I've seen (I know that they make faster ones than this) is a 566 MHz I believe.

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[yomegaman]

Alpha VMS software IS the 0.00000000000001%

:-)

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's not open source, it's crap.

If your MRI software was GNU-licensed, thousands of biomedical engineers could review the code and fix the problems in it!

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[Anonymous Coward]

The Alpha (which OpenVMS runs on) is 64-bit, so is all the Alpha OpenVMS software. Think about the Ninetendo 64 for a while, too.

Just because your toy OS linux is designed for a 386 doesn't mean the rest of the world is.

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[rnturn]

We have 666MHz ES40s at work and we could upgrade the processor boards in them to run at 866 (well, 800-something; can't remember just now) MHz. I believe that the newest Alphas (EV7) are coming out in 1GHz -- or faster -- versions. And I hear they blow anything else out of the water.

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[ctr2sprt]

It limits each process to 4GB total.

The "64GB" options in the kernel just enable the page address extension (PAE), which is a way of addressing up to 64GB for the entire OS. So you can have 16 processes using 4GB each, and you'll be using all 64GB, but you can't have 8 processes using 8GB each.

It's not impossible to write an OS which lets each process access up to 64GB RAM, but it would be nontrivial. It would require many different segments and probably a lot of page faults. And it would be a lot of work, unless I'm missing something very obvious.

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Twat.

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[psamuels]

FYI, my day job involves running MRI scans on a VMS/VAX Gyroscan Intera workstation... This 64 bit architecture is the hottest stuff around, for somebody who works with a VMS/VAX workstation...

Is this for real? Hey, it's your day job, not mine, but I thought the VAX was strictly 32-bit. Are you sure you're not confusing the VAX with the Alpha? They both run VMS, you know.

The difficulty is, because MRI looks at differential angular momentum of hydrogen atoms to obtain it's pictures, it's got to calculate a Fourier wave analysis on each atom it vibrates. Being able to run an algorithm with 64 bits means less data manipulation, higher resolution, faster scan times, and increased diagnostic imaging power to the medical doctors.

Yeah, but isn't this stuff done in floating point? Floating point is 64-bit or better on most of platforms, including the much-maligned 387. Which is not to say Alpha isn't a great platform for floating point math - that's its strongest point, actually - but that has little to do with its overall 64-bitness.

(Apologies if MRI processing is done in integer math. In that case, a 64-bit CPU is indeed better suited to the task than a 32-bit CPU.)

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you think wrong.

You can buy 1250MHz Alpha machines right now.

They were launched August 2002.

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[Bert64]

The EV68 is available at just over 1.2ghz, and at this speed is roughly 40% faster than a 2.8ghz p4 on the specfp benchmarks, The EV7 starts at 1ghz and presumeably faster versions will come later.. the ev7 should also quite comfortably beat the ev68 at the same clock

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why the Alpha at about 1Ghz tops benchmark figures over other processors. Hz means some but the number of instructions that get executed is the other significant part.

Re: 64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[Anonymous Coward]

You forget that the floating point registers on x86 (those with floating point capability) are 80-bits wide.

I agree that there are some big advantages to having 64-bit integer registers. Floating point operations are usually not one of them.

The nice thing about null-terminated strings on big-endian 64-bit architectures is that you can sort strings 8 bytes at a time. (You can also do this on little-endian 64-bit systems like ia64 as long as you reverse the strings in memory including putting the nulls first. Depending n your application, you may also need to pad the string with nulls.)

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[Kadagan AU]

*drool*
I really need an ev7 then. =)

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[Anonymous Coward]

the 64 bit Alpha port of Linux was one of the 1st
ports & Torvalds himself worked on it. So, maybe
Linux is a toy OS, but it's a toy OS that's had a
64 bit implementation for awhile.

Re:64 bit architecture: illusionary performance

[msbsod]

Everybody, get your CAT scan, scan your dog, too, and support OpenVMS, the best there is.

BTW, I used more than 32 bit address space for some scientific research program. Glad that I had OpenVMS/Alpha available. Students, researchers: wake up, there is more than just linux in the world.

If only ...

[B3ryllium]

If only my toaster was powered by Itanium!

Re:If only ...

[Darwin X]

Well...considering the heat which Intel processors tend to generate...you could probably just lay your bread in your case...and next thing you know...
TOAST!

Re:If only ...

[B3ryllium]

Not to mention bacon, eggs, and hashbrowns. (Ooh, I have a Perl hashing function that a friend designed which would make EXCELLENT hashbrowns)

Re:If only ...

[cscx]

Bah, this has already been done by some British guy... :D

Re:If only ...

[Autonymous Toaster]

And what makes you think it isn't?

By the way, would anyone like some? Toast that is.

Re:If only ...

[B3ryllium]

... because it cost less than $20 Canadian, and because it's older than two years! I think I might be able to get NetBSD on it, though.

Re:If only ...

[hendridm]

> Well...considering the heat which Intel processors tend to generate...

Funny? Perhaps it was missed sarcasm on my part. While we're at it, maybe we could also use an Athlon processor to keep our beer cold while we watch forthcoming "Itanium 2 powers your eBusiness" commercials?

You must have C3 or Motorola on your desktop. Tell me this: Does your processor underclock itself when it detects it's overheating due to a failed CPU fan?

Re:If only ...

[Anonvmous Coward]

"If only my toaster was powered by Itanium!"

What, your Athlon processor has disappointed you?

Re:If only ...

[B3ryllium]

Duron. Maybe I should snarf an XP1800+? :)

Re:If only ...

[sl3xd]

Certainly didn't dissapoint me, toasting my bread with an Athlon...

I've seen an Athlon physically melt the solder connections of a motherboard (mine, sadly). Something must've caused the fan to seize momentarily -- then the building I was in had a fire drill -- nothing wrong at all, just a test of the system... I was away about 5 minutes. Walk back to my computer, and notice the odd smell. Turn off the power immediately; open the case... The heat from the Athlon had melted the CPU fan into the CPU heatsink. The (copper) heatsink was quite discolored due to heat. I made the mistake of brushing my hand against the heatsink after I powered the thing off... (but before noticing that it was the melted fan that smelled so awful). It took weeks for the burn to heal; the act of pulling my hand away jarred the case slightly, and a couple of the toroidal cores slid out of their holes (the solder had melted) And, what's more: There were all these surface-mount components oozing downward (with gravity).

Absolutely no overclocking or tweaking was involved.

The thing I couldn't help but think was how close the fire 'drill' had come to being an actual fire... At least everyone was out of the building... All thanks to the nice, cool-running nature of the AMD Athlon.

Interesting note: The AMD Athlon pulls ~75 W of power. The average soldering iron pulls 15-30W. Pentiums aren't much better than the Athlon... Is it any wonder that many people are using these tornado cases, or liquid cooling? That's a lot of heat to be dissipating!

Interesting note II: I replaced that first Athlon with a second one.

Interesting note III: The second Athlon died (not by heat, however) under a year later.

Interesting note IV: I have yet another Athlon, which is getting close to the 6-month mark... Here's hoping it makes it to a full year!!!

Interesting note V: My next computer is going to be a Mac.

Re:If only ...

[mentin]

And alcohol distillation. But wait, that was running Linux I think.

Re:If only ...

[TheLink]

Was it really a fire drill? Or was it you turning on your Athlon PC?

My room gets pretty warm when my PC is on. :)

Re:If only ...

[Boone^]

I've got a Tornado 1000 case... worst purchase of my life. Next time I upgrade cases I'm going to attempt the >80% silenced PC since this noise truly is irritating. Sometimes buying a Dell isn't so bad after all. They're usually quiet.

Re:If only ...

[the gnat]

Intel really is running into problems compared to other architectures. A coworker went to SC2002 in Baltimore, where a number of Opteron systems were on display. They invited him to touch the chip in a running system, *without heat sink*. Warm, but not uncomfortable.

SGI has been packing steadily more of its chips into small boxes. I work with an Origin 300, and the heat sinks on the R14000 are about the size of the chipset on your standard P4 motherboard. They're now able to get extremely high density because of low power consumption; they're having to make much larger boxes for their Itanium2-based Altix servers. The MIPS chips cannot compare to the Itanium2 for speed, but relative to heating and physical space required they kick IA64's ass. Even if each MIPS chip is half as powerful, you can fit four times as many of them into the same box and you get big savings there.

Automatic underclocking is cool enough, but it's not particularly more sophisticated compared to the features that most enterprise-class systems have had for years. And it's still essentially compensation for what amounts to a major design flaw.

Re:If only ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Runs warm enough to brown your bread whilst it hotly hyperthreads.

Re:If only ...

[sl3xd]

No, it was actually a fire drill; either that or the fire marshall got to the first floor of my building before I did (~30 seconds).

Sad news

[Anonymous Coward]

I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.

The more things change

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice they don't actually show you the directory listing in question?

Because it was PR0N.

Re:The more things change

[Anonymous Coward]

careful, your total ignorance of VMS is showing!

Modern VMS applications?

[diamond0]

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?

Re:Modern VMS applications?

[moertle]

i know a company that is always making incremental upgrades to their 'legacy' software to take full advantage of newer hardware. it also allows them to do things like consalidate 5 old machines into 1 new machine with 20x the power so there are cycles to spare.

Re:Modern VMS applications?

[VoidEngineer]

This question was asked elsewhere on this post... VMS is optimised, at the very least, for fourier wave analysis... Having a 64 bit processor could make MRI scans faster and potentially have higher resolutions, as the data packets wouldn't need to be 'thunked'.

We want VMS on new hardware, so that radiologists can more quickly and more accurately diagnose things like cancers and musculo-skeletal trauma.

New MRI scanners run on VMS these days... (although there is a push to migrate to Windows, because all the PACS are Windows... a processess in which this Itanium port is probably going to be a stepping stone...)

Re:Modern VMS applications?

[hendridm]

> What new stuff runs on VMS these days?

Mozilla, Java, Oracle, Perl, BEA WebLogic and an Apache variant. Ok, maybe not all new, but have modern applications.

Re:Modern VMS applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

'thunked'

Huh? This isn't Windows. Or Algol.

Re:Modern VMS applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a top medical company, and write software that runs on several differant types of 3d imaging systems. Never once in my time have I ever seen any VMS. HPU/x, SunOS, Solaris, and IRIX are all or were common place. Before this, Data General UNIX was used. Furthermore, most medical software, when run on 64 bit hardware such as SGI, only uses 32 bit floats, and is converted to 16 bit scaled ints before being saved to disk. Most machines that need the horsepower use an external chassis to perform reconstruction, using multiple G3's, G4's or other embedded processors, utilizing several differant embedded operating systems. Furthermore, the push in the future is to Linux, because this allows all processors in a machine to run the same operating system. Sorry, but as a consolation, I do know that drug companies use VMS quite heavily, due to legacy tools being constantly upgraded, but not ported away. VMS on Alpha is supposed to be damn fast, and a great platform for using legacy fortran.

Re:Modern VMS applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice trolling, you got modded up twice for the same nonsense. "Optimized for Fourier wave analysis", heh, good one...

Re:Modern VMS applications?

[TheLink]

Supposedly VMS is a pretty secure and reliable operating system.

VMS -> Unix is like Unix -> NT.

Of course since fewer people are using VMS there are fewer data points.

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.

Re:Modern VMS applications?

[hughk]

If you want reliability and security, OpenVMS is still the only answer. Their clustering is the best around, probably because they have had it for over 20 years. That is a lot of experience.

Go to Eurex, for example. They are the largest electronic financial derivatives exchange in the world and their core systems run OpenVMS. SWIFT (the money transfer people) still do a lot with VMS as do many other people.

I have been looking at the problem of rewriting exchanges onto modern, cheaper hardware platforms with other operating systems. It really isn't easy.

Re:Modern VMS applications?

[Zeinfeld]

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?

Pretty much anyone serious about process control or mission critical stuff uses VMS. UNIX simply cannot compete with the levels of reliability those systems routinely achieved. Uptime measured in years is normal. Unscheduled downtime is due to hardware failure - PERIOD.

Re:Modern VMS applications?

[deanj]

I used VMS for years. Unix and it's utilities were far beyond it, even back when I used it. Windows is more modern that Unix, and you don't find people "in the know" saying it's the greatest thing since sliced bread either. PF1-Gold indeed

Re:Modern VMS applications?

[crawling_chaos]

You do realize that PF1-Gold has exactly crap to do with VMS? Sounds like you were using one of Digital's word processing systems tied to a VAXCluster. I remember binding the PF keys on VT102 for those times when I had to use EDT for editing, but most of my time was spent in Emacs anyway, which worked just fine.

DCL (the CLI for VMS) didn't need any more special keys than bash does. At the time I used it, its biggest weakness was an extraordinarily lame way of implementing interprocess pipelining. It was so slow that you would re-write utilities to be specificially interprocess aware and talk through mailboxes (which had nothing to do with e-mail) rather than let the shell handle the commands as filters, a la *nix.

The priviledge model on the other hand, was beautiful. You could keep know-it-all snots just out of college (like me) out of trouble by giving them only what they needed to do for the job. Unix's model of God and Peon pales by comparison.

And the clustering. Jeebus, you've not even seen clustering until you've seen VMS. We were doing more with clusters and shared resources in 1989 than most systems can do today.

Digital had the marketing sense of a camel's rear end, but they hired damned good engineers. Just goes to show that the best technology doesn't always win. Something to chew over when you contemplate the fate of the Unices versus the marketing monster from Redmond.

Re:Modern VMS applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

similarly BNP run core trading functionality on VMS clusters. I didn't realise what the machines were doing when I had to hand data over to one of the less important processes. I couldn't understand why I had to spend two days on the phone to data security people explaining what I was doing and how. Only figured it out later.

Re:Modern VMS applications?

[glenmark]

OpenVMS is used in mission-critical applications where maximum security and uptime are essential, when downtime and security breaches are completely unacceptable. Banks, credit unions, stock exchanges, insurance companies, etc. My credit union uses. My city's electric utility uses. Numerous lottary firms use it. The DoD uses it extensively (including in the recently deployed J-STARS system.)

It may not be sexy to the public eye, it may lack the mindshare of *nix, but it is an essential, reliable workhorse underlying much high-end computing infrastructure, utilizing many technologies which other operating systems are still struggling to catch up on, especially clustering.

Re:Modern VMS applications?

[glenmark]

Accurate accept for the the reference to journalled filesystems. Spiralog was pretty much a failed effort. VMS does however have a very rich file system.

Re:Modern VMS applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, it's niche is running the same software it's been running constantly since 1968. I suppose that answers the parent's question...

Re:Modern VMS applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's 1978. You haven't been running constantly since 1968, that much is clear.

Re:Modern VMS applications?

[Zappa]

I know some applications running on OVMS besause of the possibility to attach and manage loads of serial devices via lat to it. One is running a testsystem for medical instruments, the data of about 300 tested systems is managed via one system and that without any problem since setup.

Re:Modern VMS applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you want it to run? Oracle, Apache? yep

Re:Modern VMS applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, Spiralog didn't work out. But there is non-Spiralog RMS journaling, in the form of a layered product with the typically-imaginative name "RMS Journaling."

So your correction of the original poster is wrong

Contest

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenVMS is in the process of porting to the Itanium® processor...Hence, we are opening a 'guess the boot date' contest. This boot contest is a fun way for you to forecast the exact time that OpenVMS will first boot on the Itanium processor (boot is considered when OpenVMS boots; a user logs in and does a directory command without crashing the system).

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

[DAldredge]

Yes. Job Security.

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

[CrazyJoel]

with openvms, you could play galtrader!

Re: Reasons to use VMS

[dattaway]

You may have described why I have fond memories of this arcane, yet robust operating system. The command line syntax may have been puzzle, but people who I worked with were supportive and fun to be with. Digital made the highest quality equipment (uptime measured in years,) but VMS had a productive and gentle culture. The fact that my peer group had good taste in beer (and brewed their own too) also may have helped too.

VMS will never be forgotten. It may be complex kind of user friendly, but the system was a work of art. Hopefully, parts of it will find the mainstream and live forever.

Re: Reasons to use VMS

[Anonymous Coward]

> VMS will never be forgotten. It may be
> complex kind of user friendly, but the
> system was a work of art. Hopefully, parts
> of it will find the mainstream and live
> forever.

Yes it does - in NTFS ... ;-)

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.

Re:Reasons to use VMS

[Garin]

Yep -- wonderful, reliable, dependable clustering. VMS does clustering like no other operating system that I've ever seen, and it's been doing it for ages.

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.

Re:Reasons to use VMS

[_xeno_]

Apparently the longest running OpenVMS cluster had an uptime of around fifteen years until the building it was in was condemned and it had to be moved.

And since a VMS cluster can be fully upgraded automaticaly without any downtime to the cluster as a whole, the system can be continuely upgraded with no downtime to the users.

OpenVMS's clustering is the reason why most VMS users think that it's so cool. Think about it - 15 years of uptime. That's insane.

Re:Reasons to use VMS

[Jeremy Erwin]

Yes, Galactic Trader. I loved that game. I tried playing the mac "port" but my first thoughts were "Where are the slaves and drugs?"

Re: Reasons to use VMS

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. Where are the useful features like file version numbers, or consistent HELP documentation, or customizable CLI? All they included were the nightmare ACLs and longer filenames. Besides, NTFS is merely a filesystem, not an OS.

Re: Reasons to use VMS

[Black Parrot]

> OpenVMS's clustering is the reason why most VMS users think that it's so cool. Think about it - 15 years of uptime. That's insane.

Yeah... especially running your cluster on 15 year old CPUs. For the "every 18 months" version of Moore's Law, that's processors 1/1024 as fast as you can get these days.

Another post said VMS supported on-line upgrades. I wonder if it supports hot CPU swaps?

Re: Reasons to use VMS

[Garin]

Or you just buy new computers and add them to the cluster, as you retire the old ones.... You don't need to stop the cluster to add or remove servers.

Re: Reasons to use VMS

[_xeno_]

I wonder if it supports hot CPU swaps?

Use the right hardware, and yes, it does. (I believe that OpenVMS also supports removing a processor by automatically moving any processes running on that processor to a new processor with no data loss. I forget if you need to tell OpenVMS to "turn off" the processor or if you can just pop it out. I think certain combos of VMS and hardware allow true hotswapping, where the CPU can just be plucked out with no loss to the OS.)

With clustering, you can add new computers to the cluster. Therefore, the cluster does not run on continuously 15-year old CPUs. You take a computer out of the cluster, upgrade the computer, and reinsert. (Or, more likely, get a new, more powerful computer, add it to the cluster, and retire a computer that's due to be removed.)

Therefore, the cluster itself stays running 24/7 with no downtime, and the individual computers in it can be upgraded over time.

So no, an OpenVMS cluster with an uptime of 15 years is not running on 15-year-old hardware or running a 15-year-old OS - it can be continuely upgraded throughout its life. And, generally, it is.

Re: Reasons to use VMS

[Brainchild]

I think certain combos of VMS and hardware allow true hotswapping, where the CPU can just be plucked out with no loss to the OS.

Certain models of VAX hardware were fault-tolerant and had more than one CPU (usually three); the CPUs would "vote" by running the same code and comparing results. If two CPUs agreed and one didn't, the one that didn't was marked faulty, and a message was sent to the operator.

The future was ten years ago; now it's just in syndication.

Re:Reasons to use VMS

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a hardcore Linux person. The one OS I would switch to without much doubt would be VMS. It's a workhorse. It's _the_ workhorse. It just won't fail. I had the privilege of working 4+ years with VMS (got a 6 figure job offer because of that) and I *never* saw it fail and those machines were one of the few doing useful stuff 24x7. During the same time period, I saw Ultrix, Digital Unix, SunOS, Linux and AIX go down at least once a year (and Windows once a day ;-)

Re: Reasons to use VMS

[j-pimp]

Well the only problem with UNIX providing "anarchy" as you put it is that is one of the reasons that current thinking is disallowing shell logins whenever possible. Sure you don't "need" them with the new dumb terminal, the web browser, and its widget set, html. However, without keeping enough control availble to encourage controled systems of anarchy, the anarchy ends.

Re: Reasons to use VMS

[Anonymous Coward]

Tru64 (>5.1A) supports CPU hotswap as well. IIRC, OVMS can support memory hotswap, too.

The only hardware platform that supports this currently, AFAIK, is the wildfire. In Tru64, you do have to offline the CPU (using hwmgr and SCM) before removing it. The scheduler handles it perfectly. Processes get smoothly re-scheduled, and anything you have bound to the offlined processor (using runon, eg) will sleep until a new CPU is popped in. Memory hotswap was scheduled for Tru64 in a future release (it would have been a bonus once node-to-node process migration was implemented), but now it looks like that will have to wait for some future version of HP-UX.

Re: Reasons to use VMS

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, don't worry. Unix will be providing unintended rootshell access to users for years to come. The anarchy will continue.

Re: Reasons to use VMS

[Anonymous Coward]

The clustering was nice on VMS (Univ. of Washington, 1987-1991), but it was not entirely seamless. When a machine in the cluster went down, there was a noticable...pause...in...the...system...while...th e...cluster...updated...its...members. And users on the machine that died were SOL.

Re: Reasons to use VMS

[k9jdk]

In its newer versions and h/w it indeed supports hot CPU swaps among other things.

Re: Reasons to use VMS

[j-pimp]

Well its not whether rootshell access is intended, its who intended it.

In Soviet Russia, unix box has unintended root access to you.

Re: Reasons to use VMS

[Ponty]

As I understand it, that's how OS/390 (or whatever it's called) on the big IBM mainframes works. Pretty damned amazing if you ask me.

Sad news

[Anonymous Coward]

I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this evening. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.

open source?

[static55]

i might actually care about this if the software is open source and not just another proprietary unixy OS.

Re:open source?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey zealot, VMS is NOTHING LIKE UNIX.

Open source open source open source open source!! Why don't you learn something before you rant? It would you seem semi-intelligent and not like the mindless zealot you are.

Some people OSS supporters can backup their arguments with facts, but 99% can't. You're in the majority.

Re:open source?

[Anonymous Coward]

someone might actually care about what you think if you weren't a fucking dumbass.

Re:open source?

[static55]

i guess i'm just saying that openvms seems rather esoteric to me and if i'm not free to download the source code, compile it, and tinker with it, i don't think it's really worth my time. I'm not going to jump through some company's hoops, pay them money, and agree to their license just to learn their software.

oh, and the two responses to my post so far are basically personal insults. it makes you two look like intelligent people, certainly not like a couple of fucking dumbasses.

Re:open source?

[slaker]

VMS is a lot like Unix if you type "posix" at a prompt. :)

The results are back

[Anonymous Coward]

Biker Boyz is better than The Fast And The Furious.

But can OpenVMS do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_
g_______________________________________________g_
o_/_____\_____________\____________/____\_______o_
a|_______|_____________\__________|______|______a_
t|_______`._____________|_________|_______:_____t_
s`________|_____________|________\|_______|_____s_
e_\_______|_/_______/__\\\___--___\\_______:____e_
x__\______\/____--~~__________~--__|_\_____|____x_
*___\______\_-~____________________~-_\____|____*_
g____\______\_________.--------.______\|___|____g_
o______\_____\______//_________(_(__>__\___|____o_
a_______\___.__C____)_________(_(____>__|__/____a_
t_______/\_|___C_____)/______\_(_____>__|_/_____t_
s______/_/\|___C_____)|_INTEL___(___>___/__\____s_
e_____|___(____C_____)\______/__//__/_/_____\___e_
x_____|____\__|_____\\_________//_(__/_______|__x_
*____|_\____\____)___`----___--'_____________|__*_
g____|__\______________\_______/____________/_|_g_
o___|______________/____|_____|__\____________|_o_
a___|_____________|____/_______\__\___________|_a_
t___|__________/_/____|_________|__\___________|t_
s___|_________/_/______\__/\___/____|__________|s_
e__|_________/_/________|____|_______|_________|e_
x__|__________|_________|____|_______|_________|x_
*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_e_x_*_


Goatse in your EYE!

Brought to you by the Deepside Nigs

KILL WHITEY!


Garbagetogetarroundthehomolamenessfilterthatcmdrsh itheadinstalledtokeeptheblackmandown!Garbagetogeta rroundthehomolamenessfilterthatcmdrshitheadinstall edtokeeptheblackmandown!Garbagetogetarroundthehomo lamenessfilterthatcmdrshitheadinstalledtokeepthebl ackmandown!Garbagetogetarroundthehomolamenessfilte rthatcmdrshitheadinstalledtokeeptheblackmandown!Ga rbagetogetarroundthehomolamenessfilterthatcmdrshit headinstalledtokeeptheblackmandown!Garbagetogetarr oundthehomolamenessfilterthatcmdrshitheadinstalled tokeeptheblackmandown!Garbagetogetarroundthehomola menessfilterthatcmdrshitheadinstalledtokeeptheblac kmandown!Garbagetogetarroundthehomolamenessfiltert hatcmdrshitheadinstalledtokeeptheblackmandown!Garb agetogetarroundthehomolamenessfilterthatcmdrshithe adinstalledtokeeptheblackmandown!Garbagetogetarrou ndthehomolamenessfilterthatcmdrshitheadinstalledto keeptheblackmandown!Garbagetogetarroundthehomolame nessfilterthatcmdrshitheadinstalledtokeeptheblackm andown!Garbagetogetarroundthehomolamenessfiltertha tcmdrshitheadinstalledtokeeptheblackmandown!Garbag etogetarroundthehomolamenessfilterthatcmdrshithead installedtokeeptheblackmandown!Garbagetogetarround thehomolamenessfilterthatcmdrshitheadinstalledtoke eptheblackmandown!Garbagetogetarroundthehomolamene ssfilterthatcmdrshitheadinstalledtokeeptheblackman down!Garbagetogetarroundthehomolamenessfilterthatc mdrshitheadinstalledtokeeptheblackmandown!

Re:But can OpenVMS do this?

[Elbereth]

Warning!!! Goatse links in the above post!!!

Re:But can OpenVMS do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? What was your first clue? Was it the huge ascii representation of the goatse.cx guy? Or /. reporting that the link was to a goatse.cx domain? Or are you actually the biggest moron in the world and you clicked the link?

Open?

[baywulf]

I am curious as to what sense that OpenVMS is open?

Re:Open?

[palfreman]

Open as in comes with a TCP/IP stack and can be connected to over the Internet. Supports Telnet _and_ Apache, runs X. That is what the Open bit stands for. I've actually used Netscape 3.01 on it! -

Re:Open?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am curious as to what sense that OpenVMS is open?
In the same way that Greenland is green.

Re:Open?

[Anonymous Coward]

Specifically, open in the sense that it complies to POSIX standards.

Re:Open?

[JordanH]

• I've actually used Netscape 3.01 on it!

It runs Mozilla 1.3, too.

Re: Open?

[Black Parrot]

> I am curious as to what sense that OpenVMS is open?

In the marketing sense.

Re:Open?

[pesc]

The Digital marketeers changed the name from VMS to OpenVMS when the OS got its POSIX branding. The funny thing is that VMS got it before most UNIX systems did.

In those days, there was a lot of fuzz among customers about the need to buy "open" systems and not "proprietary" ones, (meaning that VMS was proprietary and Solaris or HP-UX were open). That's why Digital felt POSIX branding was a good thing.

Then the customers bought lots of M$ Windows stuff instead; so much for wanting "open" systems!

Another fact: VMS came with source code from the start! On microfiche. Not so that you could recompile the OS, but rather learn about it, check bugs, etc.

Re:Open?

[VoidEngineer]

Well, I just happened to have these links lying around, as I work on VMS/VAX systems at work (Gyroscan Intera system). These links are sort of the OpenVMS equivalent of gnu.org, gnome.org, redhat.com, and so forth...

Core OpenVMS
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/

OpenVMS Future Release Contents, Schedules
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/openvms/roadmap/open vms_roadmaps.htm

OpenVMS and Core Layered Product Documentation
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/doc/
http://www.openvms.compaq.com:8000/
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/commercial/

Core OpenVMS Support Search Engine URLs, FTP Patch Area http://askq.compaq.com/
http://ftp.digital.com.au/pub/ecoinfo/
ftp://ftp.service.digital.com/public/vms/vax/...
ftp://ftp.service.digital.com/public/vms/axp/...

The OpenVMS Freeware
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/freeware/

Encompas
http://www.encompassus.org/

Tech Help OpenVMS
http://askq.compaq.com/
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/wizard/
ftp://ftp.service.digital.com/public/vms/vax/...

Re:Open?

[Anonymous Coward]

>sort of the OpenVMS equivalent of gnu.org, >gnome.org, redhat.com, and so forth...

No, those are Compaq sites. Try OpenVMS.org, htp://www.openvms.org.

Re:Open?

[snStarter]

And you could buy a source license for the OS as well so you could modify the OS if you had sufficient skill.

Much of VMS was written in BLISS-32 whose back-end produced fantastic code - sure it was code no human being would have written - but damn good code just the same.

Being able to pull out the microfiche and check out the BLISS source was often useful when learning to program deep into the OS.

Not to mention the DECUS meetings where you could talk to the developers. I can remember the meeting in LA when at a small session DEC and the guys from MIT revealed the 782 - assymmetric multi-processing. It was exciting stuff. DEC had some really good engineers.

Remember - the VAX was about the ultimate CISC processor. Memory was scarce in those days - having 64MB of RAM was a big deal! The processor was very efficient in the use of memory.

Re:Open?

[Anonymous Coward]

We actually found bunch of those microfilms from our computing lab admin room when we moved the faculty - something like 500 microfilm cards - and it took a while to figure out "proper" use for them. Finally, we ended using them at pre-purchased drink "tokens" at annual CS student ball. One can't make much sense of the scribings on the films, but most were able to find "big" interesting 8.3 style file names on banner "pages" which gave them much fun.

Re:Open?

[Anonymous Coward]

If memory serves, it already has DII COE approval for the new integrated unix-style commands for the next VMS release.

Yes, you can run DCL (the normal CLI - Command Languag Interpeter) or you can run it with unix-style commands.

The xenophobes that haunt slashdot might actually be able to lean something about a far superior operating system (especially one with far fewer security bugs).

Re:Open?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it was 9.3 until about version 4 when filenames could be up to 512 chars. ASCII not unicode.

OpenVMS

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenVMS is used heavily in the financial industry, primarly due to security and stability.
I had an OpenVMS machine at home at one point, but the power supply crapped out...

Re:OpenVMS

[hatrisc]

openvms is very secure. as such any organization which needs high security will benefit. they're different modes of interaction seem very beneficial. perhaps *nixes could learn a thing or two about security from the ideas about openvms.

it's like this, search for a security hole in *nixes at bugtraq. now, search for a whole in vms. you'll see what i mean.

Re:OpenVMS

[WetCat]

Really... OpenVMS has a VERY BAD security.
If you leave SYSTEM/SYSTEM on login,
it allow you everything.
And also it has a privilege "grant yourself any
privilege :)"
Its logging is OK, though.
Does it have information labelling?
That versions I saw, nope. May be some hardened
versions?
OpenVMS need a administrator genius to be secure, systems with a really good security should allow a relatively dumb user to administer them securely.

Re:OpenVMS

[hatrisc]

ok... so, you're saying that vms isn't secure without a smart administrator? give me one system that is secure without a smart administrator? try leaving telnet open, or an unupdated ssh or leaving any system on a network and not being smart. of course you have to be smart.

Re:OpenVMS

[Tony-A]

You can leave a bank with the front door open and the safe open.

And also it has a privilege "grant yourself any privilege
Seems just as reasonable as having to login as a member of the wheel group to be able to su to root. Better to be running around without all those privileges you could grant yourself.

Re:OpenVMS

[Zeinfeld]

And also it has a privilege "grant yourself any privilege :)"

And anyone who has the priv is automatically reconned to have SYSTEM.

There is a major advantage to be able to have an account where you can turn on privs when you need them but run with them turned off by default. What you do is to grant the exact privs needed by specific applications, the least privillege principle.

Of course never having used a secure O/S, you probably think UNIX is a great model with only 2 priv levels, nothing and absofuckinglutelyeverything.

Re:OpenVMS

[WetCat]

Yep. Ok. B[123] or A1 security.
At least RSBAC security for Linux (www.rsbac.de)

Re:OpenVMS

[WetCat]

>you probably think UNIX is a great model with >only 2 priv levels, nothing and >absofuckinglutelyeverything.
No. I am not. It is my opinion that there were a lot of good systems before (you know who) starts
to create unmanageable from the security point of view systems like
RSX,VMS, Windows NT...
Those systems are common in following:
- a huge and unmanageable Discretory Access Control structure (ACL and privileges).
- a lack of ability to create virtual machine.
or good isolation between processes.
- No Mandatory Access control structures or
just rudiments of that.
- No information labelling.
- An enormous amount of subjects and objects of
access.

For good systems I can account, for example RSTS/E, TSX.
Or even mainframes' OSes (OS 370, VM/SP).
May be CRAY UNICOS.

Re:OpenVMS

[hughk]

Are you trolling or something?

VMS had Mandatory Access Controls, and information labelling but that was in Security Enhanced VMS only. The problems was getting export licenses. It was possible, but hard work. There was an experimental Orange book 'A' system (with a VM) produced but this couldn't even be sold outside the government without problems.

ACL and privileges were relatively easy to handle. There was only one manual you needed to look at and it was explained clearly there. It was quite useable by anyone who took the time to look at the docs.

Isolation between processes a problem under VMS? No, I think you may be confused there. With fine grained control over quotas, it was difficult to trash other processes. Indeed this was the main problem with VMS, building a new process was so expensive because of all the protection built around it.

As regards the subjects/objects - this really wasn't a problem. You could group your subjects into a class and grant or revoke access via class. The number of objects isn't really avoidable, because directories could be protected but directory access isn't worth a damn because most file systems allow you to open directly via node number.

RSTS/E and TSX security wasn't even slighly comparable. RSTS definitely didn't have a VM. Essentially it was just a multithreaded basic interpreter. OS 370 was certainly not up to much (starnge but IBM really didn't 'get' security' in those days) and Cray also not (it was designed as a fats number cruncher). Actually security on the Cray was a problem for many people ivolved classified/non-classified research because it was very difficult to securely partition the system.

Re:OpenVMS

[hughk]

You have to start somewhere and SYSTEM has to have everything. You can lock it up though very easily and normal system administration doesn't require the use of the SYSTEM account. I don't know what you mean by "SYSTEM/SYSTEM", because the standard password was manager and for over ten years you were forced to change it during installation..

Managing a complex system like OpenVMS does not require that you are smart, it just requires that you read the manual "Guide to OpenVMS Security".

Are you trolling or something?

Re:OpenVMS

[Zeinfeld]

No. I am not. It is my opinion that there were a lot of good systems before (you know who) starts to create unmanageable from the security point of view systems like

Fortunately it does not appear that anyone takes much notice of your opinion.

VMS had very tight isolation between the processes, each of which ran in a completely separate address space.

When people start holding up VM as an example of how to structure an O/S for anything you know they are blowing smoke. VM was so disfunctional that users could not even share files without major aggravation. This led to account sharing on a massive scale at CERN.

Yeah, yeah, yeah....

[spurious cowherd]

.....it's cool

Now, get off the stick & build the Alpha EV8+

Re:Yeah, yeah, yeah....

[hendridm]

> Now, get off the stick & build the Alpha EV8+.

Hmmm, perhaps they don't care about Alpha anymore?

Add one to the list

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenVMS is dead
Sun is dying???
BeOS is dead
BSD is dead
SCO is dead

Linux lives on.

Re:Add one to the list

[Anonymous Coward]

"Linux lives on"

So does Windows :o(

Vector math isn't called 64-bit

[yerricde]

Would it help with graphics applications?

No, graphics would use vector operations, which use 64-bit vectors but are not called "64-bit" operations. A "64-bit" operation is typically defined as one that uses a 64-bit number or a 64-bit pointer, not a vector of four 16-bit numbers. Current 32-bit processors are perfectly capable of performing operations on vectors of 16-bit numbers through such instruction set extensions as 3DNow! and AltiVec.

In other news:

[jim3e8]

Commodore One successfully executes LOAD FROGGER,8,1!

Re:In other news:

[Rhinobird]

Try this one:

LOAD "$",8
LIST

Take THAT OpenVMS!

Re:In other news:

[Anonymous Coward]

OPEN 15,8,15,"N0:BYTE_ME" Sadly enough, that was from memory!

WOW!

[Wakko Warner]

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!!!

No, wait... what the hell does this matter? We're shutting the few remaining vaxes at work off soon...isn't everyone?

- A.P.

Re:WOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

You provided the answer: it's 2003 and you have VAXen still running. Duh.

Re:WOW!

[k9jdk]

Shutting down vaxes should have been done long ago if porting to Alpha was done, either by ISVs or internally written apps. Lots faster, 64 rather than 32 bits, cheaper to maintain, etc.

In Soviet Russia...

[hcgenius]

OpenVMS boots you.

Very cool.. wish I still cared about VMS

[unfortunateson]

I grew up on VAX/VMS at school after a highschool exposure to (and part-time job thru the college years using) PDP-11s.

Compared to the various dialects of unix, the VMS environment was so much friendlier and forgiving... I'm only now realizing how much my hands were in mittens using it. I'd still prefer a system that wasn't so case-sensitive.

The chief engineers behind VMS then went to work at Micro$oft to develop NT, so some of the legacy is still there: expensive process starts, but a nice memory model to work with.

Strengths:
Linkers in the early 80s that were easy to cross languages in a single project
A powerful set of run-time libraries, including some excellent flatfile databases
A scripting language that had access to a nice library of "lexical" functions.

But like I said, I wish I still cared. While we still have Alphas around running openVMS at the office, I haven't logged onto one for about three years. Somewhere, I have a huge library of shell routines, login scripts, and ancient forms-oriented code.

Re:Very cool.. wish I still cared about VMS

[John_Sauter]

"A powerful set of run-time libraries...."

Thank you. I worked on various aspects of the VMS run-time environment from 1978 to 1992. I am currently the sysadmin for a VAX 4000-50 running OpenVMS 7.3.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)

why VMS?

[linuxislandsucks]

I talk form personal exp on vax/vms druing my stint at Purdue University during 1990s..

Considering that VAX/VMS sucks when compared to unix..why?

Remember the architecture person for both VAX/VMS and winNT is the same damn idiot....

A dir command? Where's Doom?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pfffft... AFAIK, an OS has only arrived when Doom gets ported to it...

No congratulations for selling out...

[dmp]

Congratulations????

More like, way to sell out. The Alpha platform is much older and is actually more powerful than the Itanic. There is nothing to be happy about here, it is just the end of the line for the DEC tradition of excellence that began with the PDP-10.

Welcome to the end of DEC excellence. The sooner HP dies the better. HP has done nothing innovative for computing in the last decade. Instead of spending money porting OpenVMS to Itanic, they should be out getting Apple to run on Alpha and get EV8 out the door. Then go back to Microsoft and re-open DEC West. HP kow-towing to Intel, instead of commercializing a superior architecture.

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:No congratulations for selling out...

[Anonymous Coward]

they should be out getting Apple to run on Alpha and get EV8 out the door.

Why should they do that? The PowerPC is (at least!) TWICE as fast as the Alpha chip, at the same MHz speed!

Re:No congratulations for selling out...

[vaxzilla]

Well, the matter of Compaq/HP dropping Alpha is another topic. My congratulations are directed to the porting efforts of the OpenVMS team for successfully port VMS to yet another architecture. Sadly, they don't get to choose their target platforms; that's a decision that's been controlled by their employers through the years. As engineers and as professionals, they're a very dedicated and respectable lot. They've persevered through the years in spite of (quite often stupid) decisions made by the business side.

Re:No congratulations for selling out...

[Anonymous Coward]

Innovations didn't save DEC from its stupid managment.

Lack of innovation will not save HP.

Re:No congratulations for selling out...

[Bert64]

Not according to recent SpecFP benchmarks which put the 1.2ghz Alpha EV68 ahead of the 1.3ghz Power4

Re:No congratulations for selling out...

[Bert64]

Isn`t microsoft under a court order to maintain a port of NT to the alpha architecture?

Re:No congratulations for selling out...

[Anonymous Coward]

No - they had a deal with DEC to maintain a
port (in fact DEC provided the engineers) but
then DEC/HP decided to drop it before W2K/NT5
came out.

But all their hard work was lost!

[RandomHavoc]

Too late they realized that they had forgotten to implement a shutdown command or even a copy command and the filesystem was corrupted when they turned the power off.

Re:But all their hard work was lost!

[pesc]

Too late they realized that they had forgotten to implement a shutdown command or even a copy command and the filesystem was corrupted when they turned the power off

Hello!??! This is VMS we are talking about. The filesystem is not corrupted on power failure.

Re:But all their hard work was lost!

[sl3xd]

You forgot to mention that This is VMS we are talking about: It doesn't need to be shut down-- Ever. The only time it does shut down is in the event of a power failure... and its UPS has drained itself before the backup generator is brought on-line.

Too many people have been ruined by cheap PC's that have to be rebooted; I still remember the amazement I felt when I learned that mainframes (which is what OpenVMS runs on anyway), just dont' crash-- ever. It took me months to get used to the fact that you didn't have to reboot the thing-- ever, for any reason whatsoever. Entire CPU upgrades, OS upgrades, entirely new OS kernels / system builds -- nothing brought it down.

Re:But all their hard work was lost!

[Anonymous Coward]

Once upon a time I was looking over the sholder of a coworker who was a VMS guru. We were working on a multiuser system, but it was late at night and only a couple of us were logged in. I can't remember what we were debugging but from the counsle he paused the whole operating system, dropped to a >>> prompt, fiddled with a couple processes in (paused) running memory, and then 'unpaused' the system. Everything resumed operations and since it only took a couple seconds none of the TCP links died and nobody noticed.

Q: Why do French army uniforms look so good?

[Anonymous Coward]

A: Because they only need to have camouflage on the back.

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: Oh Alpha, where art though?

[Black Parrot]

> 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?

Link people to that whenever you hear them say "Let the market decide!".

Re:Oh Alpha, where art though?

[Bruce Perens]

I used to feel this way... until I bought a Multia. But I agree that all of the hype we're seeing today is about stuff that ALPHA did 10 years ago. It's a damn shame.

Bruce

Re:Oh Alpha, where art though?

[Bruce Perens]

And when we're done bemoaning what happened to ALPHA, here's another to think about.

Remember the iAPX 432? A message-passing architecture implemented in hardware, with every function living in its own privilege ring. You could do that machine right today. And you wouldn't have to use ADA to do it. Someone should make more new silicon in this direction. IA64 goes a little bit in this direction, but it's too easy for operating systems and compilers to not use its capabilities in the name of portability. With the '432, there was never any possibility of the OS running on anything else.

Bruce

Re:Oh Alpha, where art though?

[hughk]

What ran on the iAPX432? You needed special software to properly use the silicon. This is one of the reasons that IA32 was improperly used for so long - most software chose the LCD way of running because it was simpler.

With the original VAX architecture, there were four privilege rings. You had the usual user space and kernel space. You had exec space which was used by RMS (Record Management System) and allowed it to do complicated things like cross user buffer sychronisation, securely but outside the kernel. It was also used by some of the Digital database systems. The other mode, supervisor, was for the command intrepreter. VMS fully used all these special facilityies which made it non-trivial to port to other architecture (they tried initially to go to MIPS, but that failed).

Best part of VMS?

[Smallest]

automatic file versioning!

if you have foo.txt and you save another foo.txt in the same directory, you get foo.txt;2 !

damn, i wish Windows had that.

-c

Re:Best part of VMS?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is nice, and when you referance foo.txt you get the most recent version.

I think most people don't know how much of the internals of Microsoft Windows NT were borrowed from VMS. Dave Cutler was the leader of both efforts, and was personally recruitted by Gates. It's too bad he didn't include more useful features like automatic file versioning and native symlinks in NTFS. Speaking of which, is there still a POSIX subsystem in the resource kit that allows symlinks?

Re:Best part of VMS?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's so great about that? Say you request foo.txt which one do you get (the more recent)? It's not very intuitive. That extra ;2 might as well be foo.txt_2, it's just part of the name at that point.

Re:Best part of VMS?

[Moloch666]

You don't understand. First of all when you request foo.txt it will request the latest one. Second the ;2 on the is handled by the OS. So when you request foo.txt you will get the latest. If you made a big mistake somewhere want to go back serveral save points you can then open foo.txt;2. It's very intuitive.

Re:Best part of VMS?

[Ed Avis]

Apparently Dave Cutler wanted to put the file versioning in NT as well, but Microsoft thought that Windows users wouldn't understand it. From a response he sent to the (now 404) 'Dave Cutler Fan Club':

Versioning in the VMS file system was a great feature and one that I would have liked to brought forward into NT. However, it was so hard to sell a new file system at all and multiple versions of the same file, although managable by programmers, might not have been so manageable by PC Users.

Re:Best part of VMS?

[hughk]

Yeah but file versioning was from the file system (ODS) which was really Andy Goldstein's thing.

Forget NT/XP, I want it back on Linux now - I really miss it, especially whenever I screw up. Of course I have no chance adding versioning to WInodws, but I know that someone could at least do that to Linux.

Regrettably, I don't thin k it will happen. A lot of Unix people who briefly touched VMS looked upon this as an inconvenience. VMS had its problems compared to Unix, but this was't one of them.

Re:Best part of VMS?

[bockman]

Too difficult for PC users. They would forgot to put a limit to the number of versions, and fill the hard-disk without knowing why (because Explorer by default would only show them the latest version). Well, this is what happened to me when I was a VMS newbie around 15 years ago.

Instead, try 'Versioning File System for Linux' on Google. You might hit some interesting link.

Re:Best part of VMS?

[Ed Avis]

But you are perfectly able to stick your files in RCS, CVS or any other version control system. CVS has a high learning curve at first, but once you know the half-dozen useful commands it's very easy (especially with the Emacs vc keybindings).

I agree it's not quite the same as getting past revisions _every_ time you save the file, and you do have the effort of typing a log message when you commit a new version of a file, but it's no trouble once you get used to it. I have a directory ~/cvsroot for my personal stuff and keep almost everything important in CVS nowadays.

Re:Best part of VMS?

[hughk]

The point is with VMS is that the versioning was in the file system - RCS or CVS is an extra much like CMS under VMS. However under VMS, you could access CMS libraries directly from the language sensitive editor.

With VMS you could edit something a few times and you would have those versions hanging around until you or your system manager did a purge. This was really useful. With CVS/RCS, you must think about it first.

Re:Best part of VMS?

[Ed Avis]

If you use Emacs then you can turn on some wacky option to keep numbered backups and then you really do have every saved version hanging around. But it's not the same as having it for _all_ applications.

I think you could probably hack libc to give numbered backups without that much difficulty, but there isn't really the demand for it when explicit version control systems are available.

Re:Best part of VMS?

[hughk]

The thing is that under the VMS file system, everything supported file versions. This included ;0 (the current version), ;-n (nth previous version) as well as ;n (absolure version n). Because it was built in, it worked with evrything. This was the same with other facilities, such as the record management file system.

You can do everything under Unix, but because one developer does things one way, it doesn't mean to say that other apps would work with it. OpenVMS provides the support to everything, and it doesn't matter which language it is written in.

Re:Best part of VMS?

[AlphaFreak]

The logical names, of course!

$ define thefile test:thefile.dat
$ run myprogram
$ ! Do some testing
$ define thefile production:thefile.dat
$ run myprogram
$ ! Do some work...

I really miss that...

Re:Best part of VMS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ugh. Yeah I remember that. Another annoying file name extension tacked on (LOGIN.BAT.1;, LOGIN.BAT.2;, blah, blah, blah...). Just the sort of thing that Ken Thompson, the Unix community, and MacOS developers passionately hated.

arrrrgh

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we get an "In Soviet Russia" modifier, please?

Just curious

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly about OpenVMS makes it "open?" Is it a marketing slogan or is there more to it?

Re:Just curious

[Meowing]

The name alludes to open standards (XPG4, CORBA, DCE and so on) rather than open source. In other words, it works and plays well with others, and you can port your favorite toys to it.

Re:Just curious

[Woodrose]

They adopted the "Open" qualifier when they passed the Posix test suite.

SLAM!

[rowbuht]

Yes, but can you play solitaire on it?

nope...

[Bendebecker]

The university I attend still uses VMS on one of its main servers(an old DEC I think.) It seems that the only free COBOL compiler that actually runs right only runs on that system. If they got rid of VMS, they would have to buy a comercial version of a COBOL compiler which they don't want to do. It also turns out VMS's systems are more secure than UNIX systems since people have been looking for holes in UNIX for decades. No one in their right mind wants to use VMS let alone hack into a system running it so VMS systems have remained safe.

Re:nope...

[yomegaman]

I used to help maintain a VMS cluster when I was a student, and we always joked about how it didn't matter if someone got unauthorized access. I mean really, how many script-kiddies would know what to do at a DCL prompt? :-)

Re:nope...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hack into VMS ? The last DEFCON voted VMS the "most unhackable". You'll need thermal underwear in hell before Linux and Unix (and Windows) get that vote.

Re:nope...

[Hercynium]

heh... the atmospheric sciences department at my old university continues to run a VAX/VMS system to this day, though, sadly, because it's so expensive to upgrade it's getting switched to linux.

Anyhow, the weather geeks there had a tradition of sorts, called 'getting hammered', invoked whenever a console had been abandoned... still logged in! They would pull some sort of prank on the poor sap, usually emailing everyone else in the department from his/her account describing how he/she still needs a night-light to sleep or some such nonsense!

At the time, I was dating the weather center director, and somehow ended up with two roommates who were both meteorology majors... I ended up learning some DCL just by watching them, especially since at one point my computer was the only one in the dorm that worked! I learned of their careless little habit and set to work exploiting it...

By writing a script that was executed upon login I faked a DCL prompt that intercepted their commands and absolutely confused the heck out of their poor souls! It re-mapped commands, spit out nonsense error messages, questioned their motives and even mocked them! The best part being that I got to watch the whole time! muhahahah! Just to be nice though it had an embedded command to un-install itself and apologise, heheh!

Okay, I'm through bragging... but just remember, it's not the script kiddies you have to worry about... it's the bored demented programmers!

--

New Hampshire

[Kadagan AU]

Congratulations on a job well done to the folks at ZK03 in Nashua, NH!"

HOLY CRAP!!! I lived in NH for 16 years, and I was positive that I was the only person in the whole state that had a computer!!

Portable OpenVMS and NT

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been told that Cutler & Co ported OpenVMS
to a 386 PC and showed it to Ken Olsen, who then
banished him (and his team) to Portlan OR, which
was way too close to Redmond.

I was also told that DEC was able to force M$ to
deliver NT for Alphas at the same time (if not
before) it was available for the x86 simply because
it seems some VMS internal logic was part of NT.

I dunno. But the story-teller seemed to have a
good grasp of the DEC line-up and had worked
there. (The stories of sniffing the dry-erase
markers were way too believable.)

no.

[Kadagan AU]

We're shutting the few remaining vaxes at work off soon...isn't everyone?

We still have lots of systems running VMS, one is a VAX, and a bunch are alphas. We have no plans to stop in the foreseeable (I know, I can't spell) future. They run some important apps that we don't have on other operating systems.

~Jon

VMS is the worst OS ever.

[daknapp]

VMS is a superb OS, but it is now viewed as déclassé in most circles

VMS is the worst operating system I have ever encountered, period.

It might have decent preemptive multitasking, but the entire premise of the OS was to deny users as many privileges as possible, thus ensuring systems people full-time employment.

I can still remember having to go and beg to have my disk allocation increased to 2 MB. VMS is one of the reasons PCs took off so quickly; at least with a PC, you don't have to go on your knees and beg for indulgence from a prick every couple of weeks to be able to be able to get anything done on your computer.

Re:VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Black Parrot]

> It might have decent preemptive multitasking, but the entire premise of the OS was to deny users as many privileges as possible, thus ensuring systems people full-time employment. I can still remember having to go and beg to have my disk allocation increased to 2 MB.

Same thing happens under UNIX if you have a disk quota. Don't blame the operating system for company policy.

Re:VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Syre]

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...

Re: VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Black Parrot]

> 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.

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.

> 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.

Yes, they had separate "page" and "swap" files. IIRC, "swap" was for dumping entire processes and "page" was for dumping individual pages from a running process. Also, there were something like a dozen system parameters for tuning the paging behavior to your specific needs. When I last worked with it they were fixing Autogen so that it would benchmark your users' actual memory usage and then suggest values for tuning the sytem the next time you used Autogen. I remember spending days reading and re-reading the Orange Books and later the Gray Books, to see what all that paging stuff was about.

Re:VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea and the tire on the Flintstones car never had flat either...
I'll take a modern OS anyday over the dinosaur that is VMS.

Re:VMS is the worst OS ever.

[sl3xd]

What, like the latest crop of Windows? Which owes its heritage to VMS as much as Mac OS X owes to Unix?

VMS is a modern OS. It had features decades ago that are considered 'bleeding edge' to the Windows & Unix world.

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: VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Black Parrot]

> > 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.

Actually, there was a study about a decade ago that showed that the average PC cost a company $15,000-$20,000 per year to own and operate: $5,000 for the official costs and another $10,000-$15,000 for the run-down-the-hall-and-bother-an-expert cost.

Some companies might reasonably conclude that it's a better bargain to give you less disk space on a server. Especially if your work doesn't require a lot of space in your personal directory.

Re:VMS is the worst OS ever.

[another_mr_lizard]

The level of security in VMS is what keeps it in circulation. I work for a major european bank and we use VMS for all of the major banking systems (except websites - they use Oracle and ftp their files to VAX - which is just about the only regular problem we have to deal with).
The fact that we can lock the system down as much as we do is why it hasn't been replaced by more "fashonable" OS's

Re: VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Ed Avis]

100 megs of hard disk space may cost ten cents, but when it has to be backed up and shared across the network (and you have a large number of users all wanting 100 megs) the costs increase. Besides, I am pretty sure that two megs back in the VMS days cost rather more in hardware than a hundred does now.

Re:VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll take time to create an account later. My name is Christophe Le Cannellier, and worked with DEC and VMS for many years.

If you cannot make the difference between an operating system and a PC, then you're damn right, stick to PCs, it's all what you deserve (and I'm generous).

VMS gave to users many powerfull features thru a great command language interpretor (DCL), and offered programmers great features as well(RTLs, System Services ...)
The architecture of the perprocess/system space with the implementation of transfer vectors allowing user code to warp to shared images was great.

There could be thousands of other feature wich could be put ahead, but you probably wouldn't even understand the name, so why waste time ?

For the others (those who are likely to understand was a system is), consider also the ODS file system, and all the technologies arround the cluster.

A VMS system is a large system, and its many admin control features were mandatory to administrate safely and efficiently all the users and applications the machines and to support in a *professional* environment. It's not a wintel gameboy one's has to reboot several times a day.

The first security rule you have to apply is :'what is not explicitely allow is not allowed', that's the way you manage also a firewall, eg.

One's can argue about the pros and cons of anything, but being aware of what you argue about is a prerequisite.

Anyway, VMS future is behind, I'm afraid. Too bad, but that's the way it is (for many reasons, mostly non technical, imho).

I still whish it the best of luck, this is going to be needed, now hosted by a company who stopped inventing anything for decades (apart printers, maybye), but who still believe their cutting edge.

Look at what they've to to linux : the port to PA risc was started years in late, was never achieved properly, and the only significant contrib was ... printers drivers !!!
I kew a company once who did the port on the most brilliant proc (Alpha), who designed and gave compilers and tools, ect ect ...

Go stick to HP and wintel, your expert profile is likely to interest them.

Re: VMS is the worst OS ever.

[daknapp]

100 megs of hard disk space may cost ten cents, but when it has to be backed up and shared across the network (and you have a large number of users all wanting 100 megs) the costs increase.

Thank you so much for perfectly illustrating the attitude I was complaining about. Those pesky stupid users, always wanting more storage and more memory. Why can't they just make do with what you give them and quit whining?

FWIW, my experience with VMS was trying to do science with Vaxen at a national lab. The wonderful thing about Vaxes running VMS was that even if you could get privileges or memory enough from the sysop to run your code, it still ran like a sick dog.

When I was doing my thesis in 1985, I compared my code running on a 6 MHz 8086 to the same code running on a (supposedly) hot Vax. Wall clock time for the exact same calculation: PC: 30 seconds, Vax: 90 seconds. CPU time was probably less for the Vax than the PC, but then, I didn't get the whole thing, now, did I?

Granted, things got a lot better when the alpha came out, and I love the architecture, but the Vax experience has always left a bad taste in my mouth for all things DEC.

Thanks, but I'll keep my PC (not necessarily Wintel, but personal computer), where if I need more memory I can just go buy it, and some jerk sysop won't get his jollies by preventing me from doing my job.

Re: VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Ed Avis]

Are you arguing that users should not have disk quotas? That if there are several users with home directories on a disk, each user should be allowed to take as much as he wants until the disk fills up? (Including buggy programs which generate huge files of log messages, and so on.)

Re:VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Ed Avis]

People always talk about how Windows NT is a descendant of VMS, and that may be true internally, but from the user's and programmer's point of view, Windows seems more like a perverse Unix variant with slashes the wrong way round. It hasn't adopted the weird VMS pathnames or shell language or file versioning that are the most obvious things a user sees when interacting with the OS. And the Windows API owes more to Win16 and strange things that happened back in the mists of time with OS/2 and Windows 1.0 than to any user interface DEC provided with VMS.

I think Mac OS X is a lot closer to Unix than Windows is to VMS.

Re:VMS is the worst OS ever.

[hughk]

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.

This was a *feature*. If you were trying to create so many events as to blow the audit subsystem, the system manager had the *option* to tell VMS to shut itself down so as to protect the audit trail for forensic analysis.

Re:VMS is the worst OS ever.

[ralphclark]

That's just plain wrong. VMS was very sophisticated internally, even by today's standards. If by modern you mean *nix, that's wrong too since the basic design of Unix is over 30 years old.

VMS was also a very good application platform with incredible stability and a wonderfully rich set of APIs.

The only criticism I would offer is to do with the DCL shell which, although fairly feature rich, was hardly rational or intuitive in design. Lexical functions for example - did *anybody* ever learn to handle the context-sensitive calls (like the ones to do with queue information) without having the manual open beside them?

More fundamentally, DCL lacked command-line pipes - which are hard to do without once you have tasted Unix. When VMS became OpenVMS a POSIX shell was added, but it was very sluggish in processing large files through pipelines. I once heard an explanation something along the lines that the POSIX shell command line pipes in OpenVMS v6 were implemented using terminal IO rather than buffered IO and this slowed things down. I don't know what the truth is about that.

Having said all that there were some things VMS enjoyed that Unix doesn't. I have often lamented the absence in Unix of VMS logical name tables which in VMS allow you to define a "logical" device which is actually an ordered searchlist of directories. This allows any application *transparently* to make use of a PATH-like variable for any and all file accesses. Its a very useful thing to have and if you have never used it you may be surprised to learn of all the places where it comes in useful. The most obvious example would probably be where you want a hierarchy of config files (specific in turn to site, host, user, pwd).

Re: VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Bert64]

Ofcourse, if every employee at a company has their own cheap diskspace sitting on their desks, you get to problems like backups, reliability and portability...
What if the cheap IDE disk in the secretaries PC fries? all her data is lost... If a single SCSI disk as part of a raidset on a high end server dies, then the disk is just replaced and the array rebuilds itself. And ofcourse if all the important data is stored in one place it can be backed up all at once too, just incase worse things happen to the drives.. It would be far too costly to go around everyone`s workstations taking backups every day.
When it comes to portability, a given employee can login anywhere in the office, or even in remote offices if necessary, and access all their files, doing this with 500+ desktop machines is incredibly difficult, due to the frequency with which they may get unplugged or rebooted etc..
However, the admins should take into account what business the company does, and provide adequate space for each employee, so that assuming they do their work and dont try to save loads of downloaded porn, they shouldnt have a problem.. Ofcourse ever less efficient fileformats will just keep making this more difficult.

Re: VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Bert64]

On the assumption that your 6mhz 8086 was running dos...
VMS is a fully featured os, it has a kernel, virtual memory, etc etc etc... DOS is by comparison extremely simplistic... if you want a modern comparison install dos windows and linux on a single machine and compare the speed of your calculation, dos will be quicker because it can divert 100% of the processing power to your task... Unless ofcourse you have to use the crappy dos disk drivers.
The VMS system also most likely had a lot of other users all trying to do things at once.
But this all goes to show the inefficiency present in modern os designs, some is essential for the task (multiuser, protected memory, multitasking etc) and many things are not.

Re:VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

They were kind enough to port this feature to Windows NT. (MCSE finds audit checkbox, day later MCSE is staring at a hung box adn screaming users, scratching his head.)

Actually, I'd be really shocked if you couldn't do this on Unix/Linux -- what's the point of having permissions if you can't log access failures, and what's the point of having a log if it overwrites itself?

Re:VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yikes! The man's got a point, especially when it comes to PC's. It's a shame it took so long for PC's to be as robust as VAX's, but still...

Re:VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD (probably 2.0) originally was the Unix crowd's answer to the Virtual Memory System. VMS came first (along with the Vax), but BSD (as a Unix OS and not a v7 Unix add-on) arrived shortly afterwards.

Re:VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

VMS is supposed to use the spawn approach to creating new processes instead of the fork. If a posix shell is implemented on non-Unices using the Unix programming idioms, it will probably be as slow as cygwin. But if you have the world's newest fastest machine it probably won't make much difference anyway. Not that I don't prefer the Unix approach. As a desktop environment, VMS is about as good as DOS as far as I'm concerned. Productivitywise... well, I'm sure it's better than MSDOS.

Re:VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, this insistence on having a volume for this disk or a drive letter for that file system really is annoying. Sucks as bad as using brackets and (double ?) colons in path names or that fuckin' backwards slash that is so wearing on my right pinky. This is the legacy of the ANTI(!!!)-Unix crowd. Pricks.

Re:VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Woodrose]

As it turns out, the same person who designed VMS -- Dave Cutler -- designed Windows NT. VMS and NT are more closely related than 16-bit Windows was to Windows NT, once you get past the GUI. I believe a lot of the demand-paging algorithms were kept, although it was hard to map the KESU (kernel-executive-supervisor-user) hard shell address space to the Intel instruction set, which didn't support that many modes (and one of the reasons we've been suffering BSOD's ever since)

But DCL was the real peach -- batch queues were powerful, involuted, dangerous and somewhat feudal; security was utterly brilliant. I had zero breakins or hacks in 10 years as sysadmin/system programmer of a highly politically-sensitive site.

Loved VMS, moved to MS, got MCSE, moved to Unix/J2EE...

Re: VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, at that time (15 yrs ago = 1988), they did not have 100MB PC hard drives. 20MB HD was VERY large for an IBM PC at that time, as was 256KB RAM.

PCs took off because the applications that made the most sense to use PCs for (spreadsheets, wordprocessing) made so much more sense resource-wise compared to the facilities for doing this on mainframes (and were generally better anyways)...

Re:VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Syre]

What I'm referring to was that at least in early versions of the logging, you could have it log a message about the fact that it was logging a message... this obviously would kill everything real fast.

Also, logging was synchronous, so if you logged to the hard copy terminal things got rather slow, depending on how low a level of operations you decided to log. And if it ran out of paper, you were screwed.

Re:VMS is the worst OS ever.

[k9jdk]

Define modern please. How is VMS a dinosaur? Version 5 and older perhaps, but v7.3-1 (current) has all the features one might need in this modern world we live in. Go to http://www.openvms.compaq.com and browse around. Not too many dinosaur items there.

Re:VMS is the worst OS ever.

[hughk]

Are you getting confused between the audit subsystem and the operator log? The audit subsystem didn't normally produce any user readable messages. However, it could send them to OPCOM. However, you only ever turned on what you wanted with OPCOM, and you could even enable audit subsystem messages without SECURITY prvilege.

The perils of enabling everything was an exercise shown on the System Manager 101 course. You learned then only to enable what you actually needed. It was no problem to log one thing and then to have another appear on an operator console. It was even possible to shoot the log to another node for remote logging.

Re:VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Milford Poltroon]

Well, I'm just a crufty old troglodyte who has managed nothing but MVS, RSX, VMS, RT-11 OSes and numerous Windows viruses, and who has used and abused IBM 1130, S/3, S/360, NCR C-100, Burroughs B and L-series systems as well as PDP, VAXen, Alpha, and military black box systems since 1970, so I guess I'm not well equipped to respond. But let me put on my baseball cap (backwards, of course) and give it a try. 1) VMS is pretty darned easy to learn and to manage. I wrote a best-selling user guide on the OS less than a year after first encountering a VMS system. Compate VMS staffing requirements with those of mainframes and big Windows installations. 2) The privileges and quotas which caused you so much grief are intrinsic to the security of the OS. How many Critical Updates have been issued for VMS in the past month? How many VMS systems have been brought down by bugs, worms, viruses, hackers, and other vermin in the past month? How often do you see a BSOD on VMS? 3) Check out the CERT advisories and compare the number issued for VMS with the number issued for Windoze and the plethora of Unixes. Yep, if you have a Wintel box, you don't have to go on your knees and beg for indulgence from a prick every couple of weeks to be able to be able to get anything done on your computer. Neither does anyone who decides to hack your system!

Re:VMS is the worst OS ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

The 2 meg disk quota was most likely in the days where you had disk drives with only 50 MB. The users were also lazy and didn't clean up their disk space. The quotas prevented user x who attempted to create a huge file full of junk, from crashing someone else's program that was processing something useful because all the disk space was used up by some idiot, incompetant user.
Many times that user only needed the 2 Meg, anything else was unauthorised use. As a note Windows 2000 server has implemented disk quotas.
At least with VMS we don't see all these viruses, and it is not because people don't try to create them it is because of the built in security.
I've been a system's admin for 20 years and it is a job where you have to bring order to chaos, and deal with whiney users who try to get away with anything they can, from processing their small business's accounting and income tax returns to playing games when they should be doing their real jobs.
Privs are handed out when needed and removed when not needed, ie a programmer says he needs to use priv x because he needs to use routine y, he gets it. When he is finished with that development he looses that priv.

I'm not an anonymous Coward I just don't want to create an account.

Good Ol' Open VMS

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember working with Open VMS on Vaxen & later on Alphas. We wrote control systems that ran on them, gas, water, electricity distribution control systems.

Great I/O facilities built into the OS, gotta love that QIO system call.

By why use OpenVMS ? Well its as solid as they come, easy to secure, great documentation.

Its a shame DEC/Compaq/HP/Whoever owns it this week won't take on M$ in the server arena with it.

Re:Good Ol' Open VMS

[hughk]

Yes, the QIO was great, a single call for I/O with either semaphore or completion routines (or even both). The problem was the item lists (also famous from the various get information system services). What was neat though is that all user level I/O went through the same system services so it was easy to coordinate.

What I would like is the distributed lock manager to run undr Linux. Then I could have a nice cluster.

Re:Good Ol' Open VMS

[levitte]

The item lists are actually a great although simple thing, and allow for functions to be very easily extended without breaking any APIs.

Re:Good Ol' Open VMS

[hughk]

They seemed simple but but they gave developers a big headache. They were also a pain for the operating system deveopers to work with because all buffers had to be address checked and where necessary, copied to pool to prevent user modification during the call. The overhead associated with this was not conducive to performance - but the VMS approach was secure.

Re:Good Ol' Open VMS

[Woodrose]

Supported x-windows too. Would be fun to compare cost-benefits for people who aren't terribly interested in the screen saver/doom market (e.g. helpdesks, etc.). Did I say DCL was a hoot?

Now all we need...

[Istealmymusic]

...is for Itanium to run on FreeVMS!

uhm

[Anonymous Coward]

a punch in the eye is better than a kick in the nuts.

what's your point?

your sig

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's not sourcecode.google.com, it's some other thing. I'm confused.

Optimized for Fourier wave analysis????

[Bruce Perens]

I know of a very large US company that makes MRI scanners using Linux.

Regarding your claim that VMS is optimized for Fourier wave analysis, I can't believe that this is unique today. The main impetus behind VAX BSD was ARPA's desire to have a Unix system that would handle the memory demands of computer graphics. We made use of various Unix systems at Pixar and Pixar's predecessors, where there were similar sorts of problems (texture rendering rather than FFT) and Linux is now the darling of those places.

This is a VM and cache issue, not really rocket science these days.

Thanks

Bruce

Typo

[Rhinobird]

that should read LOAD "FROGGER",8,1
oh god, I actually remember that...

VMS can bite me

[Jeffrey Baker]

At university, I only came near VMS under threat of force, because I have an invariant habit of typing 'ls' in any new login, screen, or xterm I see. This is fine in Unix, but in VMS it invokes Kafka's own editor, which has no known method of termination, not even convoluted emacs or vi compatability.

Re:VMS can bite me

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, LSE's QUIT command is a lot harder to guess at than meta-control-shift-X-do-si-do.

Re:VMS can bite me

[hughk]

$ ls:== dir/brief

in your login.com would fix that.

Actually LS is an abreviation for LSE brings up Digital's Language Sentsitive Editor (LSE) which was based on TPU. TPU was like a much higher level EMACS largely programmed in its own language. LSE made programming very easy with builtin language and procedure call skeletons as well as excellent folding. LSE was quite expensive when originally distributed (you got TPU bundled) for non-educational users, so many people missed out on it.

Pirst Fost!

[Anonymous Coward]

HA HA HA
My sPuNk0rs in j00r hA1r!

Itanium has the worst luck

[1nv4d3r]

Man, can't Itanium get a break? First, the overpriced, lackluster performance. Now, VMS.

I guess some people must like it, but I never saw the appeal. My roomate in college once used a boot disk to rename all the files in my home directory from xxx yyy to XXX;2 YYY;5. I had an immediate, horrible reaction.

I installed Win98SE on his machine the next day.

VMS trivia question

[terras]

Who knows the name of the DEC engineer who cleaned up after Dave Cutler's messes?

Re:VMS trivia question

[hughk]

Dave's exec code was good (forget that PL/1 compiler) but one of the other architects who was critical to VMS development was Andy Goldstein. He was responsible for amongst other things, the file system design (and much of the original code) and the security architecture.

Re:VMS trivia question

[mikefoley]

Please don't speak of Andy in the past tense. He's still there and still working on VMS, 20+ years.

I saw him just a couple of weeks ago when I was in ZK, visiting a friend for lunch.

I'm a former system manager (sysadmin to Unix folks) that worked in the VMS Development Group.

Re:VMS trivia question

[hughk]

Whats he doing these days? Its ages since I last saw him (about 10 years).

I met him a couple of times at DECUS events and he was always good to listen to. Around that time I was involved with the start of the Security SIG and he had been architecting the security extensions. However, he was also good to talk to about the XQP, which was a really neat idea.

I don't get to work on VMS so often these days and haven't done so since last year. Most of the people working at the site where I last worked had a minimal knowledge of the system, even to the point of downloading files to edit locally on PCs and then copying them back rather than using great tools like LSE (which they had).

Re:VMS trivia question

[Anonymous Coward]

System administrators are computer graduates who can't carry a coding load.

The beauty of VMS

[blair1q]

Let's ask fortune(6):

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, Chmn&CEO, DEC, 1984

Re:The beauty of VMS

[pesc]

Ken said: 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

Having done much programming on both UNIX and VMS, I can say that this is completely true. VMS is much better documented. All parts fit together better, and the documentation is very clear. And VMS has more features that UNIX is missing, such as handling asynchronous event, doing parallell async I/O on dozens of disks simultaneously, scaling to thousands of network connections, etc. If you do some types of programming, UNIX certainly feels like a toy system. (It is becoming gradually better, though.)

Re:The beauty of VMS

[Ben Hutchings]

Unix is snake oil

Ken Olsen, 1987 (I think)

Re:The beauty of VMS

[blair1q]

Asynchronous events? You mean like signal(2)?

Parallel async I/O? You mean like select(2)?

Scaling to thousands of network connections? You mean like the Internet? You're right...no UNIX machines on the Internet. None at all. Not a one. And none of them with namespace for 65K open ports. Per protocol.

Frankly, there's nothing VMS can do internally that UNIX can't do with a little middleware, and lots that UNIX can do that VMS didn't have designed into itself by the company that went broke trying to keep it up with UNIX.

Someone mod-1:troll the previous post...

Re:The beauty of VMS

[Anonymous Coward]

It is obvious that you don't know what you are talking about. select is known to not scale, and async disk I/O is still implemented very poorly on UNIXes and please don't for gods sake compare signals with VMS's asynch event mechanisms. These are things that VMS have had since the beginning and that most UNIXes still don't get right.

Re:The beauty of VMS

[blair1q]

It is obvious that you don't have any proof that I don't know what I am talking about. Select scales to the scale it needs to scale to. Async disk I/O is implemented as well as it can be on a multitasking system. UNIX was a clean, extensible, understandable system and VMS was a hulking beast that was nearly impossible to modify without the involvement of DEC. And by the time I got to both, the documentation for UNIX was online, searchable, and tractable, while that for VMS was still 80 lbs of fat, orange, vinyl binders. Olsen's faint praise for VMS was all he had left to market it with, because he saw the flood of UNIX users coming to push it away.

Re:The beauty of VMS

[Anonymous Coward]

That is not actually what he said. You'd think that by now all the morons would stop spreading this urban legend.

He said somthing along the lines of anyone who tries to sell you a Unix system saying that it will solve all your problems is selling you snake oil.

Which is true. Anyone who tries to sell you anything as a solution to all your problems is selling you snake oil. That is exactly how "snake oil" was sold - it'll not only cure your cold, but also your gout, your children's lazyness, and your spouse's dandruff too.

Re:The beauty of VMS

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't agree. Asynch I/O is still either done with threads (which is very bad for several reasons) or has bugs that makes it unusable. As a developer of a DBMS I have extensive knowledge of this and have implemented disk I/O on almost all UNIXes and on VMS. Still no UNIX can compete with the performance and stability of VMS disk I/O.

Last year we tried to move a DBMS system with 4000 concurrent users to a couple of UNIXes. The reason this failed was because select did not scale. This is a known problem and I am surprised that UNIX lovers don't want UNIX to be better?

Goodbye

[Anonymous Coward]

Goodbye, Alpha. It was nice knowing you.

or it contained

[SHEENmaster]

WINNT51.BAS!!!!

Unix / VMS comparison

[conan_albrecht]

Anyone know a web page that compares modern Unix to modern VMS? I already know the commands differ, but what really separates them? I know VMS is very stable and works quite well at what it does (whatever that is). My Debian boxes are extremely stable, too. Sorry for the newbie question, but the VAX was before my time.

Re:Unix / VMS comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Try http://www.OpenVMS.org. Not everything you're asking for but it's a great start.

VMS on the desktop; a stable PC OS...

[TheRealStyro]

This will be damned good. I'll be able to hobble together a system and put a stable OS on it. Sure, it won't have a pretty interface and be able to run all the pretty bloated applications, but it also won't crash all the time and programming for VMS is a breeze (ok, stay away from C & C++, but everything else is cool).

Now if can just hold my breath for a few years until IA64 and VMS are released...

Re:VMS on the desktop; a stable PC OS...

[foonf]

This will be damned good. I'll be able to hobble together a system and put a stable OS on it.

Don't bet on it. I would be surprised if this port actually works, much less is officially supported, on anything other than HP systems with special firmware. Now maybe HP could, given some vision, turn VMS into a seriously competitive OS for commodity IA-64 hardware (especially if the free hobbyist license was still available). But current management seems to show little interest in their own original technology, not just DEC/Compaq stuff like VMS and the Alpha, but the PA-RISC architecture, the HP 3000 series (a midrange platform even older than VMS), and the famous test equipment division which was spun off. They see more profit in selling printers and functioning as an OEM for Microsoft and Intel. VMS is being kept around because, for a while longer at least, they will still be able to sell enough systems at inflated prices to locked-in VMS customers to justify keeping it around. Once most of them have switched to IBM or Sun machines (or maybe even PCs running some future more robust iteration of Linux) it will probably go the way of MPE.

If they sold a version of VMS that would work on open hardware it would accelerate the erosion of the user base for their hardware, and since the idea that the number of VMS users might actually increase as a result is probably completely incomprehensible to them, I doubt they would risk this.

Re:VMS on the desktop; a stable PC OS...

[IntlHarvester]

Couple points:

+ The netrumor is that DEC/Compaq/HP has contractual requirements to maintain OpenVMS for something like 20 years. So it makes sense to keep it on something almost like regular hardware.

+ Minicomputing culture like VMS or HP3000 can be very profitable, but it's also expensive to run. IIRC, Compaq announced a few years back that VMS brought in $3Billion in revenue, which is in the same league as Microsoft Windows. IBM has claimed that their AS/400 division has greater revenues than all of Sun Micro.

However, along with that is an enormous amount of engineering and support. So, they basically need to spend $50 to make a $100. Meanwhile in the PC world, you spend $5 to make $10 -- thus leading to lower overhead costs and headcounts, and that makes wallstreet happy.

The consequence of this is that if they wanted to expand the userbase, they would have to spend $100 to make $200 and that looks even worse from a gross financial perspective.

(The inverse of this is that you can legacy the thing and all of a sudden you're spending $20 to make the same $100 for mucho shortterm profits, until the customers figure out and flee like rats.)

So, they quietly milk the existing base and don't worry about evangalizing. I notice that lots of VMS stuff is still hosted on digital.com, and the product is still littered with trademarks like "DECWindows". I imagine that the userbase is largely intentionally ignorant of all this Compaq/HP and Alpha/Itanium stuff and just lumbers along trusting their computing to VMS like they always have.

Meanwhile, the minicomputer culture withers away not because it's not profitable, but because it doesn't look like Dell's business model. It's a shame when profitable top notch engineering and research gets short shrift from the capitalists.

+ Propreitary hardware: My understanding is that there was some special VAX-type microcode needed on the Alpha systems. But for the most part, customers could easily switch from VMS to Unix (just like the HP3000/9000, where the conversion kit was a new label). But there's no real reason to lock them in because not many users are coming or going.

Re:VMS on the desktop; a stable PC OS...

[yomegaman]

Grab yourself a DEC Alpha machine of some sort off eBay and head over to http://www.montagar.com/hobbyist/ to find out how to get an OpenVMS license for free.

Re:VMS on the desktop; a stable PC OS...

[Woodrose]

I agree pretty much on all points -- VMS and the Vax hardware was pretty well engineered, and the engineers they sent out tended to be well clued.

When I first compared the processor speed of a Vax 6500 with a 486 DX2, I realised it was game, set, match for my old friend, and the product set would soon be declared "stable" and other kisses of doom. When RDB was sold off to Oracle, that was it -- I jumped ship.

I can't help thinking though that VMS was a brilliant business engine with a superb control language, and a commodity hardware platform running it would still make sense. There's a lot of .COM files out there.

25 years....

[bbh]

This could make VMS the longest living computer viral lifeform...

bbh

Re:25 years....

[Animats]

Not even close. Unisys OS 2200 first demoed, as UNIVAC 1100 EXEC 8, on April 4, 1967. And it's still running on Unisys ClearPath servers.

Re:25 years....

[k9jdk]

I believe UNIX was developed at Bell Labs about 10 years before VMS hit the streets. And it was developed on a DEC machine, PDP-15 if I remember correctly. WNT was developed in the early 90s and got its name from VMS. Remember the HAL-9000 in 2001 Space Odyssey? HAL was derived from IBM. H+1=I, A+1=B, L+1=M. This was done by Arthur C. Clarke WNT V+1=W, M+1=N, S+1=T This was done by Dave Cutler.

OpenVMS boots.

[Beave]

I uses/run a public OpenVMS cluster. There are still somethings that the Unix community could learn from OpenVMS. Cluster, and the security model come to mind. The stablity cannot be beat. It's good stuff. And, yes.. You can run OpenVMS on your little Intel boxes.. Check out.. http://simh.trailing-edge.com/ .. Cool stuff. Run's great. If you're really interested in OpenVMS, there's a couple of "free access" servers out there. For example: http://deathrow.vistech.net .... One uVAX, and Alpha online for public use. We're about to add a SIMH (Intel) box running OpenVMS into the cluster as well.

Re:OpenVMS boots.

[Anonymous Coward]

anyone know of a 'free access' unix cluster?

FMTYEWTK About Intel PIII 36-Bit Addressing

[psamuels]

If your operating system happens to use a flat memory model, like Linux does, this limits each process to 4GB total.

I thought it was Linux 2.2 that had the 4Gb memory limit? - I think it was 2Gb plus 2Gb actually, or 3 + 1. anyway, I'm pretty sure I've seen 64Gb as a compile option for 2.4 kernels, back when I used to use it

OK, here's the story:

The 386 processor lets you refer to memory with a 32-bit address. This is good and useful and lets you specify any byte in a 4 GB range. This is continued up through the latest Xeon. This is known as a flat memory model in that you only have one address for each memory byte. The alternative, used in the 8086 / 186 / 286 "real mode" and many other (mostly older) CPU designs, is segmented addresses, where each memory location is addressed by a segment and an offset within the segment. In some cases you can optimise out the segment address by assuming it is the same as your "current" segment, however that may be defined. Segmented memory addressing is seen nowadays as needlessly complex for general computing.

So as to flat addressing: when you refer to a (in our case 32-bit) memory address, this address is usually not the physical address but a virtual address, which is looked up by the CPU automatically via page tables. These page tables and other associated machinery are set up and managed by the OS.

Now, note that when Intel added 64 GB support to the Pentium III, they didn't use classic "segmented addressing", because that would be really inconvenient for application programmers (and compiler writers) who are accustomed to the assumption that you can hold a memory pointer in a single CPU register - and general-purpose registers on x86 are all 32-bit. Instead, they instituted a 36-bit address space through page tables - the OS basically sets up a new type of page table scheme, so 32-bit virtual addresses in an application can refer to anything in a 64-GB range of physical memory.

So from the application standpoint, it still has a maximum of 4 GB of address space, less a certain amount of overhead for the OS. More than 4 GB at a time would require larger than 32-bit addresses, which would be a major compatibility hurdle.

So how is it useful to have 64 GB of memory if an application still only gets 4 GB at a time? Because if you have multiple processes, they can each have their own page tables which don't necessarily overlap. Indeed, the OS always keeps page tables separate between processes - that's how memory protection works, and why you can't access another process's memory without explicit arrangement.

If your application needs more than 4 GB of memory, but you don't want to invest in a real 64-bit CPU, you basically have to break up your app into multiple processes each of which can allocate its own pool of non-overlapping memory, and have the processes communicate as necessary via shared memory, message passing, the filesystem, or similar.

The other way to do it is to have the application do its own overlay management. The idea here is that the app knows it needs to access memory not in the current page table setup, so it issues a call to the OS to "swap out" the page tables regarding a particular region of its virtual address space in favor of another swath of physical memory. I believe this alternative is not currently implemented in Linux, but it may be soon. I say this on the basis of Jeff Dike's proposed extensions to support multiple address spaces per process - he wants this for User-Mode Linux, but I think it could potentially be useful for overlays as well.

ZK03

[Anonymous Coward]

I was there back in October for a short visit (couple of hours actually). I didn't sign any NDA and I didn't get a good look at anything that would require one, so I guess it's ok if I tell you. :-)

That's gotta be one of the coolest places I've ever been to. It totally tops Six Flags. *Any* Six Flags. It's a very big building, and one of the wings contains _the_ lab. 20 meters wide, 60+ meters long, and *full* of equipement. One of the most impressive pieces were the several _operational_ VAXen there. As a student, I worked with VMS and a couple of VAXStations so I learned some respect for the architecture. Even if the machines are tiny by today's standards, it was absolutely amazing to see them just run and run and run 24x7. The PCs and Sun workstations on the same lab crashed every now and then. The VAXen just kept crunching numbers. So, when I saw the array of VAXen at ZK03, my jaw just dropped.

The other reason I was impressed is how neatly organized everything is at the place. You will be hard pressed to find cable spaghetti. There was some, but I you take into account the density at the place (conservative guess: 5 machines/sq m), it's just clean. And of course, all the surrounding stuff. Just neat.

But perhaps the most impressive: DEC, Digital, Compaq and HP logos all over the place. You can feel the peace. It's not as if HP went and took over and threw everything away, but intead they got there and became part of a team.

Made me think about applying for a job there.

--
nah, lieber nicht.

They're even funding a port of GCC

[guerby]

... by paying Ada Core Technologies for it:

Announcement on GNAT for ia64/OpenVMS on 14Mar2002

I wanted to let people on this list know that Ada Core Technologies has signed a contract with Compaq to implement GNAT on OpenVMS for ia64. We already have three ia64 machines in house, and are busy working on the initial step of bootstrapping the current version of GNAT on ia64.

Robert Dewar

This is great and it's the right thing to do!

Laurent

Hi dumbass

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the original replies are quite right. You're a fucking dumbass who knows nothing about VMS and probably very little about Unix.

Still, as you have apparently pissed yourself at the idea of having to actually pay money to try out VMS, maybe you should take a look at FreeVMS Yeah, see how far OSS has gotten with trying to clone VMS.

There are reasons that some things are not Open Source. Get over it and grow up.

Betting at HP

[Anonymous Coward]

I visited local HP on Jan 28 when they had a new AlphaServer showcase (nice machines if you really need more than two CPUs I suppose) and the guy told me that the folks at HP were betting when OpenVMS would boot on IA64 and they considered it would be "real soon now." I didn't think it would be this soon... ;>

To all those getting excited before it boots...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I'd just like to point out that the Hurd first booted in April 1994 and how far has it come since then?

Precisely.

Yes, it has solitaire

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, it is pretty much the same solitaire as
windows. However, there has been free software
collected in the DECUS library and the VMS SIG
tapes (which have been CDs for many years now) freely distributed twice a year from the spring of 1979 to the present. The Fall 2002 collection has just been frozen and will be distributed within days to the volunteers who make it available. It is a very full CD. These originated from contributions at DECUS symposia, but have become more net based. The total thus far is around 25 full CDs of code...not inconsiderable.

Woohoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now IBM can get to work on porting OS/2 to the Itanic!

~~~

Three platforms???

[lbonser]

I thought DEC had VMS running on MIPS processors at one point, but never brought it to market... (I might be wrong, it's been a whole lotta years!)

Re:Three platforms???

[Anonymous Coward]

There were, indeed, MIPS based DECstations, but there was only ever an official ULTRIX port. Rumours abounded about the existance of a VMS port and more rumours have it that some of that MIPS VMS code might have wound up in early versions of OSF/1, but AFAIK they were just rumours.

Ulimate CISC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends what you mean by utlimate. It had/has a badly bloated instruction set, like polyf, which would factor a polynomial. Factoring polynomials in an important function, but implement it in a programming language math library, not the microcode (instruction set).

I've only used it a wee bit, but friends who had to do major projects on VMS called it the Vomit Making System.

Whoopee

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonder how long it took to list the directory. Probably two seconds less than the five minutes it would take with the last VAX model.

YHBT!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Went right over your head.

what a bizarre paragraph

[justins]

Many, many people have contributed to this effort, including managers, supervisors, project leaders, consultants, development infrastructure group, calling standard committee, engineers working on post-boot projects, etc.
All will receive their well-deserved credit as we proceed. The following is a very specific set of people; these are the engineers who designed/wrote/debugged the code that comprises the running operating system.

list of wonderful engineers removed by Sue Skonetski

The fact that this person felt inclined to list the managers involved in bringing this about first made me suspect her of being a bit wacked. That last sentence sort of confirms it...

Why not give the engineers credit? How many bytes would that take up? Err... okay, who wants to explain "bytes" to Sue Skonetski?

Re:what a bizarre paragraph

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, Sue knows what she's talking about when it comes to OpenVMS, and has done a lot for the platform. What have you done for OpenVMS?

Re:what a bizarre paragraph

[JohnReagan]

Sue certainly knows about "bytes". She is quite knowledgable in many areas for being a non-technical person.

I suspect the reason she omitted the list of names is to keep us from getting random email, phone calls from head hunters, or worse, phone calls from people trying to social engineer themselves a password.

"At 3:31pm EST on Friday, January 31st, 2003"

[Call Me Black Cloud]

And how many seconds? C'mon, you wrote down the minutes as if this is a milestone that should be recorded in a museum or book or other historical document, so you must record the seconds. Imagine 100 years in the future, on 31 Jan 2103, legions of people will do a dir on legacy hardware, much as aviation enthusiasts are preparing for the centennial of the Wright Bros first flight. Those legions will certainly not be satisfied with just the minute.

Clue: outside your parents' basement there's a whole wide world of wonders...

Re:"At 3:31pm EST on Friday, January 31st, 2003"

[Anonymous Coward]

It was annouced with hours and minutes because there was a boot contest.

http://h18003.www1.hp.com/hps/ipf-enterprise/ope nv ms_contest.html

clue: if you use your brain for more than keeping your head from imploding, you might get a clue...

Re:"At 3:31pm EST on Friday, January 31st, 2003"

[Call Me Black Cloud]

A boot contest? Bwahahahahahah....thanks for making my day.

It's just a joke!

[RandomHavoc]

None of that would happen in real life.

Re:Wow!!! You mean like this?

[Xuther]

linkpack itanium2 vs alpha ev68

This is the performance for ev68 equipped es45's with 1.25 and 1.0 ghz processors respectively.
LINPACK 1000 x 1000 6,847 (4 CPUs) 5,522 (4 CPUs)

Link to above

I work with large scale alpha clusters, and was just in maryland earlier last month learning how to support the itanium boxes so I looked a few things up while there.

Granted linkpack isn't the only benchmark, but the processor/memory and io bandwidth looks impressive from the specs I've seen.