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

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.

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

[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.

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: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...