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VAX Users See the Writing on the Wall
Snot Locker writes "An informative piece at ComputerWorld talks about how VAX users are anticipating the costly migration to more modern systems. Several noteworthy tidbits, including hints of the port of OpenVMS to Itanium and the tale of VAX systems that have not had a reboot in 6 years!"
I didn't see THAT coming!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
If any VAXs admins are reading this and are preparing to send their machines to the landfill, why not check to see if your hardware is on OpenBSD's wanted hardware list? They actively maintain a native VAX port (and it's damn good geek karma!)
Trolling is a art,
Seems to me that 6 years of uptime will have most likely saved the company about as much money as it would cost to migrate to an updated system.
Yeah, I worked on campus in the IT department all through college back in the early 90s. We had a VAX that ran pretty much everything, and I don't think it was rebooted a single time the entire time I worked there. When students started demanding shell accounts to access the Internet (remember, we're talking pre-Mosaic here) we just added a couple extra hard drives to the VAX to provide enough space for all the students to have a couple meg of storage, and the system handled the load without a problem. We're talking about a fairly large (10.000 student) system here... it just worked. Nary a hiccup.
These are rock-solid systems that are trouble-free to the point of being kind of silly... but replacement parts were hard to find even back then. (Their VAX had been purchased in the 80s I think.)
The article mentions a VAX emulator that sounds like a much better option than the one chosen by the school I worked for back in the day: an unbeleivably expensive (nearly million-dollar) migration to an Oracle solution that never did really wind up working. (They have since migrated many of the processes to PAPER for crying out loud.)
--- JRJ
jrjBlog
...a computer that has literally run from since before Windows 98 existed until now without being rebooted.
Hell, with the critical-update-du-jour lately, it's probably hard for Windows users to imagine a computer that's been running since the previous week without being rebooted.
ComputerWorld confirms: VAX is dying
In all seriousness, the fact that VAX is still around is a testament to how damn well engineered those machines are.
so what do I do with that MicroVax in my garage that I never cracked the root password on?
Real SUV's don't have cupholders
It's 5:42 A.M., do you know where your stack pointer is?
The distant past called....
No reboot in 6 years?
Hahaha....i have a computer that has not had a reboot in almost 10 years.
In fact it's still somewhere in the closet.
I should plug it in sometime....
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
Sounds like the way people at UNC-Chapel Hill accessed the internet, circa 1994 - via dialup shells, PINE, and FTP, all through a single VAX box.
Our vendor offically recommends we reboot our OpenVMS mainframe (ES47) once a week... when I first started here I laughed at that, until I saw how crappy the code our vendor had running on top of the box (full of memory leaks, processes that would loop and suck up 100% CPU). In three years, our Mainframe has never crashed, never needed to be "just rebooted"; it has worked, no questions asked. However, I will comment that VMS is *ugly*.
About a year ago, we switched data centers, and had to power down our rack of x86 machines running Linux. A couple of them had redundancy in hardware (power supplies, RAID arrays, etc.), but the majority of them, working as a load-balanced web farm, had no redundancy at all.
Out of the rack of machines, nearly all of them had been up for the full two years that they'd been in the data center. Of the few that hadn't been up the entire time, *one* had a power supply die, the others were shut down for hardware upgrades.
Now, a year later, all of the machines are still up and running. I really don't have any doubt that a fair number of them would have achieved 6-year uptimes, had they been left in place long enough.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Lizzie Borden took an axe,
And plunged it deep into the VAX;
Don't you envy people who
Do all the things YOU want to do?
[Unknown]
The article mentions mainly about how they are looking at emulators because HP/Compaq isn't producing any new VAXs. I'm guessing HP will release a new "VAX" that is just a custom emulator running on top of intel's lastest. From a marketing point of view, it's what I'd do.
Dec had a large program back when to move Vax binaries over to the Alpha. The VEST software.
VEST
Is there really an "end of the road" when the binary keeps on living in sort of a Matryoshka
doll fashion?
Hedley
the_VAX_writing_is_on_wall.txt;252
ah...programming in assembly on the old vax. how i miss it.
64 bit words...outputting the data to the laser printers...
i miss changing disks....disk$A1:username and
using the menu system one of our grad students created to make it easier for incoming freshman...sigh...then the whole school moved over to nt4 and nothing was the same after that.
Is it 5:30 yet?
On the bright side, it had enough other POSIX stuff (file I/O, pthreads, etc.) that the rest of the port was pretty easy.
Logicals are actually kind of cool - a bastard cross between environment variables and symlinks, but you could do some neat things with 'em.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
The US Army is still using VAX systems for the Bradley Fighting Vehicle turret simulator to train crews in gunnery. Most of the simulators that were bought in the early 1980's are still going strong. AFAIK, no plans to replace them anytime soon. The damn things have be set on fire to get them to stop working.
Well, most VMS users run on Alpha and has done so since more than ten years. It's not like all VMS users are stuck on VAX and only now has an alternative with Itanium.
Funny, the article does not mention Alphas. Has HP buried that architecture so well?
)9TSS
The article mentioned migrating from a 10-year old VAX machine to a dual Athlon. I'll bet that the dual Athlon is 4x faster, and cost 10x less.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
The fact that some VAX systems haven't had a reboot in 6 years reminds me of a story my HP/Compaq representative told me about the reliability of their Proliant servers. There was a server in a data center that handled user logons to the Novell client. One year the data center was remodeled but none of the servers could be moved because users still needed to be able to log on. So they finished remodelling the room and accidentally walled in the server. 3 years later someone finally decided that it was time to upgrade that server. When they went to look for it, it was nowhere to be found. It was still running after 3 years and hundreds of thousands of logons later. (They finally contacted the remodeling company and figured it out.)
$ @SYS$SYSTEM:SHUTDOWN
The first step to upgrading to Windows 2003!
I don't envy those poor VAX folks having to migrate over to itanium, whose future is very much in question just now. Almost every week now, a report comes out about how disappointing itanium sales are, how software vendors are abandoning it, or not developing fot it in the first place, and how HP and intel keep revising their sales projections and PR fluff. itanium has gone from "going to be the defacto 64-bit standard CPU early in the 21st century offered by all major vendors" to the most widely deployed in 2-way servers and up, to 8-way servers and up, and now it will be regarded as a success if it achieves moderate acceptance in niches at the very high end. itanium was to rely on economies of scale to recoup its R&D expenditure and to become profitable. Now it will have to limp along as a costly, esoteric niche player. How long can intel and HP keep it propped up? When will the money dry up? When will HP cut its losses and move over completely to intel's Opteron clone?
Stick Men
I'm sure others will do this, might as well start the thread:
bash-2.03$ uname -sr
SunOS 5.8
bash-2.03$ uptime
3:33pm up 1213 day(s), 9:38, 1 user, load average: 0.43, 0.41, 0.45
Dump the IRS - http://www.fairtax.org
Right.
Show me RMS's heavier and less-well-groomed brother in Birkenstocks, a T-shirt, and suspenders and I'd be a little more likely to believe it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I remember working on OpenVMS on VAX and (later) Alpha systems. The OS was pretty cool for its time...it looks like Microsoft lifted a lot of its security features for NTFS in Windows NT.
HP is really keen on getting rid of their older inherited platforms...DEC systems are known for their reliability, and I know a lot of hospitals, etc. that use them for daily production work. It's definitely a minority now, but they were huge back in the day. Qualified VMS people will be very well-paid as migration consultants in the next few years as HP slowly pulls the plug on the Alpha line...they've already got OpenVMS running on Itaniums. (Side note: I SERIOUSLY hope that HP is planning on restoring their Intel server quality to what Compaq was before they were bought out...otherwise the VMS, Tru64 and HP-UX customers are not going to be happy. All the new ProLiant stuff we're getting from them seems to be cursed.)
The one thing I remember most about VMS was the _extremely_ long command lines with DOS-style switches. You could shorten them, of course, but the DEC manuals had the full text of the line written out.
it's the orange glow from monichrome dumb terminals =)
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
including hints of the port of OpenVMS to Itanium
I guess porting to the Alpha wasn't enough of a hint that they wanted to kill VMS:)
Now, of course, the Itanic is going down in a big way since Intel decided to go with ix86-64...
I'm only surprised they didn't port VMS to the i860.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I remember a MicroVax II we had in the early 90's. It ran great, but it could be a bit hard to start. The coolest thing was the disk drives. They had this great turbine almost jet engine sound when they started up. I think we had 2 reboots for the entire year. One was after replacing a failed disk drive.
So a PC from Best Buy should replace it just fine.
Uptime of 6 years ?
Pah. My abacus (which has been handed down through 3 generations) has had an uptime of nearly 100 years. And apart from missing a few of the counters (I was a curious child) it still works great.
Them thar 'puters are just new fangled junk.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
There goes the market for my copy of Programming In Assembly Language VAX-11
From about 1989 through 1999, I adminstered several VAXen. The handwriting was on the wall as far back as the late 1990's. With the dismal acceptance of Alpha-based system and the simple fact that Windows and *NIX platforms could provide similar functionality for cheaper, it was inevitable that we had to migrate. Not that they were any "better" but it was hard for IT to justify maintaining a system that 99% of the rest of the world won't touch.
I will say, though, that administering VAXen was very fun and educational. I learned more about IT in the 10 years on-the-job managing VAXen than I ever learned in college or in companies since. Unless you were willing to bring in high-paid technicians, you had to learn everything, program everything, and troubleshoot yourself.
Those were the good ol' days!
Oh, and, contrary to what some folks think, $ is the "real" command prompt!!!
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
I want my DCL and my TPU editor!
Sniff. Sniff. I miss 1989.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Amiga, Digital Alpha CPU, Betamax, VAX, OS/2,...
We live in a world of mediocrity.
Shame on us for accepting it.
PS. Lyce Doucet makes my cock hard. That accent... I'd just love to have her dominate me - almost as much as I'd like to submit to Senator Clinton.
"In my first year of studies, we had a VAX running VMS. It was a horrible operating system, certainly not an environment that made you say, 'Gee, I'd like to have this at home, too.'" - Just For Fun
Holy crap! Did the phrase "Y2K" mean nothing to these people?!?
What happened to /. today ?
It looks like troll's fest day!
First backup tapes, then Microsoft, now VAX.. what's next BSD, Apple and Sun ?
Oh.. and has Netcraft confirmed it yet?
I learned C on a Vax during my freshman year of college. I also maintained my email account on one for all five years I was there. We had three vax machines grouped in a DecNet cluster. One was the original 11/780 model, and was nearly as old as me. It still worked without a hiccup, and met the mail needs of nearly 20000 students.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
It's runs an enitre depratement and we love it.
Most people's problem with the vax is caused by
their reckless disregard for safety.
Always rember to bend at the knee's when you
bang your head against the wall. If you bend at your
waist you'll throw out your back.
I think there'll be some Vaxen clusters out there until cockroaches are extinct. We had a cluster once where I worked and no one could figure out what it did but were afraid to turn them off. We just moved the boxes around and rebooted them when they got in inconvenient spots. They'd just keep running and running. I'm sure there are factories running Vaxes that would shutdown if they stopped but its been so long they needed attention no one would know what to do if they died. Truly amazing reliability. Nothing's come close to them despite years of trying. VMS is ugly and slow but it's rock solid compared to its bastard step-child Windows.
We had a cluster of VAXes where I went to college (all named after cartoon characters). Unlike other people's comments we did have to reboot at least one of them a number of times. That was thanks to a LISP interpreter we were running on one for an AI class that I took. On numerous occasions we managed to write AI apps in LISP that resulted in so much page swapping that VMS simply couldn't find any more virtual memory to swap so it just stopped. Sort of a computers version of painting oneself into a corner....
One to hold the pot, four to shake the stove.
:-)
I remember VAX quite fondly. I wasn't exposed to it until 1995, when I went to college, and haven't really bothered with it then. But now it begs the question: did we ever really -need- to advance?
Sure, now we've got amazing graphics capabilities, and games that can make real life seem dull and colourless by comparison. But you know, games were just as much fun back then too. Who here never played Zork? Who here never played on a MUD? Okay, okay, probably several of you, but still... Even with all the amazing graphics, it seems like games were more fun back then... so games aren't the reason...
Business? Businesses ran fine on the tools available at the time. It did just enough work to get the job done. Sure, people had to do some extra work here and there, but since there weren't a billion pre-packaged automated features, what work the computer saved them was considered a blessing, rather than a hinderence. So business isn't the reason.
Communication? Bah! We communicated just fine. Email worked, BBSes worked, phones worked, fax lines worked. If we needed to make a call away from home, businesses usually let you use the phone, or make change for the payphone. Unless you were a doctor, there wasn't a single phone call or message you just couldn't stand to go without for 10 whole minutes. So communications wasn't the reason.
Was it for the Entertainment Industry? Sure, computer graphics gave us amazing films like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, but before that time, directors knew how to make us truly -believe- we were seeing a monster in lieu of some puppets and paper mache. Alien had very little in the way of computer graphics. I don't know that Star Wars (ep 4) had any... yet they remain icons of the Sci-Fi film industry to this day. Their CGI counterparts are often lame in comparison. So it wasn't for movies or TV...
Why then, did we really need to advance so far, so fast, in the realm of computers? And why take a good thing like VAX and cash it in, just because it's old?
-The Libra
"Please be patient--The future will begin momentarily."
You must reboot for the change to take effect."
[ OK ] [ Cancel ]
Pathworks is my friend.
"Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity." - David Gelernter
all this means is that there will be plenty of cheap VAX crap on ebay!
Yup. The end of life for the Alpha was announced a while ago. I belive that the current generation of chips (EV7) is the last, with the EV7z from HP the really last new Alpha.
Now, whilst it's perfectly possible to migrate from a VAX to OpenVMS on an Alpha it's a bit short sighted to migrate from a old platform to one that's about to enter the same state. The sensible stratagy is for something with a longer lifespan. The Alpha was intended to be that, back in the days of DEC, but Compaq basically folded the Alpha into Intels Itanium chips, which are quite different.
HP talks about supporting Tru64 on Alphaservers up to 2011. I read that to mean that after then, if it breaks, that's it, so you'd better be migrated off it by then [0]. So, given about a year to fully migrate, switching to Alpha would only give you 3 years (1 year to switch to, 3 years, then 1 year to move on). That's not a good proposition, at least to me.
So, the short answear was, yup, Alpha is buried, and the turf goes on top in 5 years.
[0] Granted, that's the possibly just the OS side. It's tricky to get hard details out of HP, short of cornering someone.
Remember when you could (vax) mail escape codes to send the recipient's vt100 terminal into hardware-reset-until failure mode?
Six years of uptime is pretty impressive for a computer. But it's even more impressive for the facility. Seriously -- what kind of UPS and equipment redundancy would you need to get that kind of uptime?
hehe It might not have been supieror engineering that kept that Vax working for so long.
When I started my current job, they had a Nevell v4.10 server that was running as a file & print server inside of a TV stand-cabinet!!!
They didn't know where it was, they just knew it was working.
This box had never had any work done on it. It was just installed and setup one day and left inside the cabinet all those years.
The only reason it died: the power supply croaked on it.
When I opened it up, there was a good 3-4cm of dust and crap covering all the boards, CPU and vents.
So the moral of the story: Maybe the folks running the 6-year-uptime VAX's were just lazy llamas' too! =)
[the preceeding message was just a joke, I am sure all the honourable VAX's operators are very diligent at thier jobs, and should not be compared to lazy llamas.]
[[The preceeding preceeding message was in no way ment to insult the noble Llama.]]
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
You are currently happy with it and you can get support/parts for it why scrap it?
The most I got from the article is;
>"But it's a dinosaur, and eventually it has to go," he said.
and that its not made anymore.
Thats not a solid business case to spend 200K and risk serious business disruption.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
x86 version: "The UPTIME.EXE file is linked to missing export NETAPI32.DLL:NetRemoteTOD."
Alpha version: "This program cannot be run in DOS mode."
Alpha is on life support too. EOL is in 2012, I think. See HPs web site for the whole story.
A previous poster mention emulation on emulation. I've seen it done, and heard of others doing it.
When the PDP-11s were EOLed, we ran RT-11 apps using the RT-11 emulator under the RSX-11m emulator on VAX/VMS.
I've heard of people running IBM 650 apps on an emulator that ran on a 1401 emulator which they ran on OS/360.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Overly Romantic Tale of Nostalgia. 6 years? I doubt it. Ours gets more than monthly reboots, scheduled and unscheduled, and when hardware fails be prepared to pay through the nose for proprietary hardware and service. Doesn't matter what O/S is running, power supplies, hard drives, cd drives, fans, fail. Compaq issues (fairly) regular updates that require reboots. Vax's in production environments (applications that change, patches that are applied, hardware added) run into the same problems as any other server and operating system.
The article mentions SRI's Charon VAX. This is very expensive software that requires a USB dongle for licensing.
However, you can also run VAX VMS on a free i386 VAX emulator called SIMH. I don't seem to be able to get very good ethernet performance with SIMH. However, you can run NetBSD/VAX on it out of the box, and OpenBSD will run with a kernel patch. SIMH also has a PDP-11 emulator and includes images of the original UNIX V7 from AT&T (courtesy of SCaldera). SIMH is an interesting way to run both ancient and modern UNIXen without reformatting your PC.
You can also get free VMS licenses for SIMH/VAX. They must be renewed yearly.
Alpha VMS also supported a VAX binary emulator called VEST, which is mentioned in another post here. Support for VEST is dying, however (modern RDB releases have dropped it). The Charon VAX emulator also runs on Alpha VMS.
Don't worry, even if someone erases the writing on the wall, VMS users will be able to see it, along with the 20 previous versions.
As @180,000 vax systems worldwide can attest to, those old systems ARE being used. This article isn't news so much as it is a space filler. It's trivia. There's no mass dumping of the VAX systems. Probably, their service agreements just hit a price increase, and someone's throwing a fit and had an article written.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
When thy pry it from my cold dead hands. And that goes for my Apple ][ as well.
To feed an industry that is based on the notion that obosolete hardware is somehow less useful than when it was new. If you and I just bought everything once, they would not be as rich. So we must be enticed to junk still working goods for new ones.
On the bright side, it's a golden age for ebay vultures like myself...Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
This is an old story but it seems fitting here.
)9TSS
You can't have more than one person using a computer at the same time! They'd fight over the mouse!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
A few answers:
(1) People without significant training and heavy motivation could not learn how to use computers in the "good old days". We only had a market of maybe 30% of the population capable of using them. For computers to spread throughout society, this was not good enough.
The computer industry wanted to spread, for financial reasons if nothing else, and so they made the changes needed to make computers easier to learn and use for non-experts.
(2) Marketing. People want pretty things. People can be convinced to upgrade to something "better" by giving them more pretty things. Even if the old, cerebral games were more fun, the new, slicker graphical games took over the world because they were pretty, and because many of them took advantage of people's natural desire to shoot other people. (I have never understood this, personally, but it's the truth).
I have thought many times that older computers are better, mainly because they were more reliable, and sufficiently simple that a reasonably normal person could understand how they worked, and how to fix things if they broke. Today, I doubt that any single person understands everything going on in a contemporary operating system.
Few people seriously want to go back to the old days, when 24x80 terminal screens that cost as much as a used car were all the computing even well-connected people could have at their homes. I have to admit that I'm nostalgic enough to try and find a good used MicroPDP-11 on eBay, just to say I have one. That being said, I'm not sure how much use I would make of it, and all the weird programming restrictions would surely be archaic. But it would still be nice to have an example of computing history, when we all feltl like elites who might somehow wind up changing the world.
D
You're forgetting one important area; science. Science demands fast processors and large capacity first, and reliability/dependibility second. Sure, scientists love to have dependable machines, and such is the reason most run Linux,BSD,SunOS/Solaris, or other such OSes, but they are much more concerned with number crunching on obscenely large data sets. Most of the current advances in science simply couldn't have been achieved without the powerhouse computers the are currently available.
Although I do agree a lot of our so called "progress" in computers have been steps backwards, it's not fair to say there hasn't been a single important step forwards.
As an ex-Deccie (16 years) I only wish servers today ran with the reliability of VAX servers. Oh well, progress goes on. Have to say that VAXmail was the most efficient mail system I have ever used. Incredibly fast and tons of power.
100 years uptime on an abacus? That means it's either been in someone's hand or in use (or both) that whole time. That's an awful lot of math and/or hand oils.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm suddenly reminded of the Bastard Operator from Hell Episode where he calls in a technician to fix a broken VAX, whose sole remaining function is to host an old NetHack game or something.
:E
.NET systems? Something tells me we won't have things any easier than the VAX guys when our time comes around
That said the BOFH probobly didn't care what was running on anything.
Migration from older VAX systems is going to be a HUGE pain, not because of hardware, but because of software. Though Maybe old VAX/VMS users could migrate to XP with no noticable difference.
Here's a thought though. When it's time for us all to move off x86s and up to whatever eXtremanium processors they have in the future, will any of our apps be able to migrate with us? What about our java and
May the Maths Be with you!
As somebody who's never used, let alone seen a VAX I've got to ask: is it the hardware that's so reliable? Or was it the OS? Or was it some sort of pixie magic or Good Design/Architecture/Whatnot?
I'm curious. You'd think hardware should be better today than ten or twenty years ago. I have no expectations for modern software (at all), but there's no reason a good quality modern server should *mechanically* fail. It should run 100 years, right?
I know, I know, things like power supplies blow all the time and hardisks fail. Is this stuff worse today than ten years ago? WTF!?
Anyway, what made VAXs so damn reliable? I have this image of them being made from cast iron, with quadruply redundant everything, weighing 10 tons, and surviving an atomic holocaust.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
Then install NetBSD on it..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm not an expert in this field, but it seems to me that there are two ways to get six years of uptime.
(1) A single highly-engineered machine (yeah I know VAX/VMS has clusters, whatever they are).
(2) Redundant cluster of many interchangeable parts.
Google has figured out how to do (2) successfully.
I bet that (2) is harder than it looks. How do you protect against a common mode failure in your system software? Do you run a variety of genetically independent OS's and databases's, or do you run identical software on each machine, leaving you open to monoculture failures?
Digression: It's beautiful how eukaryotic organisms solve this problem by having two independent copies of each gene. But if a gene is broken, it generally does nothing rather than produce a lethal result. And the robustness of individual eukaryotes is not enough for the requirements of computers.
A good intermediate step in any migration is to use the SIMH simulator (http://simh.trailing-edge.com). SIMH can simulate quite a few systems (including a VAX) at the CPU level. As you may expect, this involves emulating every single CPU instruction... not a very efficient way to run code! However, its saving grace is that modern processors are very fast and old VAX systems are not. Depending on how old your VAX hardware is, you might find that an emulated VAX running on a newer P4/Xeon/Athlon/Opteron will be faster than the stock VAX!
This doesn't solve the migration problem but it does allow you to run your old code on modern easily-fixable and readily-available hardware. Beats having to get all of your parts off of eBay.
On my machine it's named:
THE_VAX_W.TXT;253
My VAX has been up for a LONG, LONG time.
The amazing part about 6-years of uptime is that back in the 1980's we took it for granted! Most mainframes can stay up as long as the power reamins on. Only Windows can make us appreciate the value of perpetual uptime.
One of the reasons we had such uptime was that the software update cycle was very slow by modern standards. Every few weeks, Digital would send us a 9-track tape to update one of our products. VMS was generally once a year between major releases. Anything except an OS update could be installed without rebooting.
Before we had all of this object-oriented programming, the concept of memory leakage was much easier to debug. Also, VMS would exercise tight control over system resources -- a runaway process might cause a slowdown, but processes were limited in their ability to consume memory and page file space.
When there was a crash (it happened), we would call Digital customer support. They would actually read the crash dump and determine hardware or software, and either dispatch field service or send out a patch to be installed. It cost a fortune, but it sure beat the modern concept of calling tech. support and dealing with a semi-literate script reader.
We had three Vaxes in a cluster, attached to a pair of redundant disk/tape controllers. To this day, I hear people talk about the wonderful world of Windows (or even Linux) clusters on Intel boxes. The problem is that without multiple independent paths to your disk drives and something like the distributed lock manager, there is really no protection against the loss of a CPU or a disk controller. Digital had all of this figured out. It must have been quite an accomplishment, because I have seen mostly poor imitations of VMS clusters since that time.
VMS uses a 64 bit date/time format that rolls over sometime slightly after the Sun runs out of hydrogen, so you're right, Y2K was pretty much a non-event to VMS users, even less than it was to Unix users. Unix users better start worrying about that Y2038 problem pretty soon...
DEC sales guy, to military contractor: "You're not our only customer, you know!"
Military contractor: "No, but we're one of the few with tactical nuclear weapons."
Seriously, VMS is/was great. I started working on VMS systems in the early 80s, did my doctoral research on them, and ended up managing a bunch of them for a while, before our department migrated to Un*x. I like to say that VMS is to Un*x as Python is to Perl. One is the ultimate in organization, the other is the ultimate in freedom.
Don't those things run on VAXXum tubes?!
And you really think you can compare the uptime of an X86/Linux box to that of a VAX?
You had a handful of PCs stay up for two years. That's not bad, but one cannot simply extrapolate uptime - it just doesn't work that way. That's like saying "I lived to be 60 - I'm sure I'll live to 180 if I'm careful".
Besides, in general the effective lifespan of a PC isn't much more than five years. Your PCs are in the second half of their useful life; I'm sure the VAX is too, but its lifespan appears to be about 10X that of the PC.
Not flaming, btw - I think PCs are useful for a number of tasks; however, long life and long uptime are not part of the PC genome. Sorry.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
We're currently migrating a perfectly good Finance system to ASP.NET. Its been on a VAX for 15 years and works fine, but there is just no support left. The probabilty that we will still be using the same ASP.NET in 15 years is very low...
here
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I am old enough to remember when the VAX was king of the minicomputers and DEC was flying high. HP was a wannabe computer company. Now DEC is owned by HP as a side effect of HP purchasing another PC manufacturer. Microsoft was a footnote in the computing industry at this time.
Will Microsoft become another footnote like DEC or a niche company like IBM? Microsoft's lengthing product cycles are opening up gaps that will allow competitors to steal major market share between releases. The next version of Microsoft's software will be the last.
When the largest dinosaur is dying he does not know it, and the eventual successor is not visible to him.
When I was young, I had to rub sticks together to compute.
...I worked withVMS... VMS was my friend... and, Windows NT, you're no VMS!
Very seriously, in the early years Microsoft kept saying that Windows NT was "similar" to VMS. So when we ran into various problems, I would look for Windows NT equivalents to familiar VMS utilities.
They weren't there.
And the five-foot-shelf of well-written, comprehensive, accurate documentation in China Red binders wasn't there.
And the source code on microfiche wasn't there.
I have no doubt that in some core internal details the two systems were similar, but at the level of the ordinary user AND the ordinary system manager, VMS was far more mature. I miss VMS, and I miss Digital.
(I knew Digital... Digital was my friend... and Compaq, I mean HP, you're no Digital.)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
--You had an ABACUS?? Luxury! When I was a lad, we had to wait till NIGHTFALL and use the STARS to count!
:b
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
Just think if there was anything special you needed to do at boot time or just after. What if there was no one around anymore who knew about it? Bummer.
Who's on-line lists; command line email (so much easier to use than Outlook); me and my mates wrote an on-line magazine called Dogsday with selective readership blocking; the incomprehensible Minitab for pharmacology analysis (the *only* time my fellow students sought me out because even then I was the main geek); the late-night hacking sessions (and I was c*** at it - but for once being c*** at something saved my ass when some of the other guys got kicked out of college for managing to do the thing I couldn't - i.e. reset the login timer).
Of course, as said elsewhere, the real joy of of Vax was the ghostly warm glow from lovely orange terminals (I really didn't dig the green ones).
The strange thing is that Windows XP is an indirect descendant of the OS that probably is running on those VAX systems with those giant swinging uptimes. The story goes that back in the day, the Windows NT team had a large number of VMS vetrans on board, and that there was more than a little bit of code in common between VMS and Windows NT. The story is actually kinda interesting; you can read about it here.
The urban legend is that Windows NT is so called because if you "add" one letter to each of VMS, you get WNT (like with HAL and IBM). And then if you're feeling snarky, you say something like "see, you had to know that the NT couldn't stand for new technology." But you probably shouldn't expect anyone to laugh.
Modern systems, eh?
Funny how those obsolete VAX/VMS systems just keep on going. No crashes or reboots, flawless clustering (remember how the Dutch police moved to a new building with ZERO downtime, just by migrating processes from node to node?), rock-solid security, and tools that let admins manage huge networks of servers and workstations with ease. So-called modern systems, like Unix, are now where VAX/VMS was, what, 10 years ago, 15 years ago in some cases. Sun clusters? A joke! The failure of VAX/VMS is one of DEC's marketing department, not their engineers.
Don't forget the One True Gem from the various companies Compaq picked up: the ultra-super-high-availability (as in you have to have a full project plan to cover all the steps to make it shut down fully) Tandem. Of course, that is also planned to migrate onto Itanic.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
When Digital fired most of its VMS team in a cost cutting frenzy, Mirosoft had the good sense to hire them up. David N. Cutler who was the VMS project leader became the NT project leader at MS. Cutler brought most of his team with him. The result was that NT was in many ways a clone of VMS with a Win32 API and Win16 API layer on top. The story is famous and is told here.
(To the tunes of "Happiest days of our lives" and "Another brick in the wall pt. 2" by Pink Floyd)
Well when we grew up and went to work,
There were certain managers,
Who would hurt the Vaxen any way they could.
By pouring their derision,
Upon anything they did,
Driving Digital out of business,
However carefully they made the Vax.
But in the town it was well known,
When they got home at night,
Their fat and psychopathic PCs would thrash them,
Within inches of their lives.
We don't need to reset button
We don't need no windows key
No dark sarcasm on the Slashdot
Manager, leave those Vaxen alone!
Hay, manager, leave those Vaxen alone!
All in all it's just another Vax in the wall
All in all it's just another Troll in the wall
- identity0
Yes, we did. Computer chess games were crap back then; chess needs a fast CPU. Weather forecasting needs faster CPUs. Some financial exotic-option valuations need fast CPUs. There are a lot of problems that benefit greatly from faster hardware. The fact that you're ignorant of them doesn't mean they don't exist.
I remember working for DEC as a student worker. We had one VAX that supported our entire group (VT-XXX terminals using LSE). Today my laptop is more powerful than that VAX.
I also remember when we got an upgrade to the "new" VAX line. The old ones used to be these big washing machine types of machines, we had them in the 3rd floor, and remember waiting up there to see how they get the new washing machines up there.
I was waiting for a while with a colleague, when suddenly a technician came in, carrying a little box under his arm. He put the box on the old washing machine, reconnected some cables and left... Leaving me a my friend open-mouthed.
thanks!
Hi
Having spent the first 6 years of my computer life with VAX/VMS systems, it is sad to see them slowly disappear
There are so many if-only stories about VAXes, it is a real shame that DEC didn't market them properly, and exploit the 'new' PC architecture 20 years ago. It wasn't unusual to a VAX/Oracle server to run for 2 years without a glitch, which could be said for some UNIX/Oracle systems at the time.
Times have changed, UNIX adapted, became very stable and became available on low cost hardware. VAX just disappeared as DEC did nothing.
Talk about neglecting the Golden Goose!
Yes, it had some CGI. In one notable scene there were literally dozens (and that was a gasp-inducing number back in the day) of CGI elements on screen, in this case spaceships. The first time I saw that scene in a theater, I remember thinking how bad the CGI work was. There was one ship that started to come into view then disappeared. It was such a HUGE glaring error I figured everyone would be talking about it the next day. No one was. No one else had seen it. In fact, over time my geek friends managed to convince me I'd imagined it.
Cut to just a few years ago. I was highly gratified to catch an interview on TV with someone involved in the re-release who was talking about the big screwup in the big space battle scene. He opined that probably nobody even noticed.
Well, some of us did. If computer advancement will help that kind of stuff to not happen, little anal-retentive, highly attentive geeks like I was will be highly appreciative.
But VMS wasn't the only OS to run on VAX hardware - there was also Ultrix-32, which WAS a "Unix" (or BSD).
We just started our 4 year lease cycle on a 4 node OpenVMS Alpha Cluster. We're primarly an Oracle shop, and use the servers for our databases, but the cost is becoming prohibitive and are now looking at the prospect of a *nix migration at the end of this lease. Leaning toward linux because the TCO numbers look better, but a number of people will need to "re-tool" their OS sysadmin skills. OpenVMS is on hell of a reliable OS, but you sure can't describe it as a commodity OS -- so much doesn't run on it. Had we been a unix shop, or if Oracle 9iAS were available for OpenVMS, we could have hosted the application on existing hardware but instead had to purchase several W2k boxen to do the same job.
I have a background in Oracle, Unix, Linux and OpenVMS so have "acquired" the task of figuring out our strategy. Really fun actually!
-- Rick
I've seen some interesting responses, but they missed some of these apps:
-statistical computing--it can take a long time to do heavy number crunching
-simulations--seismology, weather, astronomy, astrophysics, and similar fields need number crunching power. This is not even talking about things like the NEC earth simulator--it gets used!
-medical research--the human genome project, IIRC, was finished early due to faster computers. I think the cure for AIDS/cancer will be a similar situation: if we want the answer, it will be found through the data processing power we now possess (along with human resourcefulness and creativity).
The list could continue, but the next time you take a modern drug, remember that pharmaceuticals have been heavily advanced by good computers.
I think that these reasons suffice--we need faster computers, more refined equipment, and better technology in general. There are uses for these things, and while we can get by in the mean time, remember that businesses got by before there were even any automated adding machines (aside from the abacus). Our ancestors all survived long enough to breed without any of our conveniences, but that doesn't mean I want to back to that. It just means that I consider myself lucky (statistically speaking) to have access to the technology that I do.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
I parted with the Vax a few years later, as my wife's only prenuptual requirement. It found a home in an upstart computer museum.
The DEC equipment was excellent. I miss it.
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.
VMS was a great operating system (except for I/O throughput). Anyone that was an engineer at DEC would say so. It was COMMON for those systems to stay up for years without a reboot (software upgrades did nto need rebooting), and it had a lot to do with the design of the software and the developers rather than the hardware. The OS had proper protections of resources and privileges, software was released with the constant concern of migration or backward compatibility, and languages all had a common call API -- making it easy to link objects compiled in different languages. Commands were user-friendly, and the GUI (if you wanted it) was X (Motif at that time). Remember that you could also not just control user privs, but about 32 other items such as disk quota, how much memory they could consume, the maximum CPU time before being forced to swap, etc. From a business perspective, a multi-user, time-sharing, reliable, networking (supported TCP/IP, LAT, DECnet, SNA, ...), and popular (DEC was #2 in the world) system was a good choice. The enemy was the mainframe -- a non-dristributed, expensive investment. It's sad developers that did not grow up in this environment will not be able to see it as anything but old technology.
- at -DEC
BTW -- yes, Y2k had little to no impact on VMS. It was designed to be date "correct" from the beginning. Extremely few Y2k patches for VMS appeared, and they were mostly for applications rather than the OS.
What killed VMS was being tied to the expensive hardware it ran on. When support for a sytem costs you 5-6 figures a year compared to buying a Linux/NT server for $1-$5k brand new, plus the VAX hardware was not compatible with other systems (except for the Alpha perhaps), you had to question it's value in your server room. Don't forget the large power consuption of the older systems as well.
If DEC had been allowed to release VMS for Intel as a product (which DID exist as a prototype within DEC), it might still be a viable choice today. I understood this did not happen due to the agreement between Microsoft and DEC when they partnered to port applications to NT and cross-train personnel for PC support -- a smart move on Microsoft's part, as it would certainly have prevented NT from catching on.
Even now Linux and Microsoft strive to achieve the same level of clustering integration VMS enjoyed almost transparently. Unix/Linux is much more flexible and efficient and cost-effective, but this comes at a trade-off of being more technical to use and with less administrative control. Eventually the "lack of applications" problem will fade away.
Hopefully Linux adoption can return us to those "no Microsoft products in use here" days.
Keith-who-was-a-VMS-product-developer-and-admin
---
Keith Barrett (kgb)
ah, forget it.
Ha, this brings me back. My first post-graduation job was for a VAX/VMS to Solaris migration. This ancient VAX had spent years processing satellite telemetry data for the U.S. government. I learned a lot about how to migrate old data into a new data structure and just generally how to get an old system to talk to a newer one. The VAX did a great job at storing and processing data but they wanted to upgrade that part of the process so that it would be compatible with some of the newer UNIX software they had built. Of course, since this was government work, the project was scrapped after several years of paying very expensive salaries in favor of supporting the VAX/VMS based system. It would not surprise me in the least to learn that they are still using the old VAX for the exact same purpose today.
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.
your internet experience should be made read-only
The last VAX I used was running 4BSD. Shouldn't be any problem porting over to FreeBSD. Oh wait! Did you say VMS? And you're running proprietary software? Written in assembler?
Sorry, can't help you...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
At least internally:
I have a screenie of VMS booting into an Itanium based cluster from May 30th, 2003.
Cant post it, because the "*"'s from the display trigger lameness filter...
Ironic.
Regression testing is not done yet, so it is only in hands of developers, and some customers for testing, like us.
There is a rumour that they have an AMD port as well...
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
God. I once had an account on a Tru64 system. It was every bad thing you ever heard about Unix, all rolled into one. Make your machine happy, put NetBSD or something useful on it, if you must have your Unix.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
I used to do system programming on a VAX/VMS before I knew UNIX. I didn't know better at the time (15 years ago), but once I learned UNIX, I knew what horror VMS is: extremely inelegant, brute force, heavy, awful. I still have bad dreams when thinking about the irregular, bulky and ugly structure of that OS. Good to read that it finally dies. Just a pity that it lives on a little bit in WinNT, which by the way is just as inelegant and ugly as VMS.
Careful with that VAX, Eugene!
I did sysadmin work back in the day and I fondly remember the great uptimes of our VAXen (running 4.2 BSD); in fact, what usually brought a system down was a disk crash -- those seemed to happen ALL the time. Thanks goodness for nighly tape dumps!
Boot from bootable media (solaris install disc, linux boot disc). Mount root filesystem. Edit the shadow file, leaving a blank where the hash should be. unmount, reboot.
Boot normally, but this time, boot single user mode (usually by adding 's' to the bootloader prompt). System will boot, but not ask for the root password, leaving you with a root shell. Then you can run passwd at set the root password to whatever you want.
Alternate option- If running linux, and the bootloader isn't locked down, add following to the end GRUB or LILO "command line":
init=/bin/bash s
You will be dropped straight into a root shell, as the scripts that would have asked you for a password will never get run.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I don't need no arms around me
I don't need no drugs to calm me
I have seen the writing on the wall
Don't think I need anything at all
No, don't think I need anything at all
All in all it was all just bricks in the wall
All in all you were all just bricks in the wall
Pink Floyd - The Wall
void*x=(*((void*(*)())&(x=(void*)0xfdeb58)))();
DEC didnt' die. It was murdered by the CEO and middle management. They made attempts to get into the PC market (anyone remember "Rainbow" ?) with what was essentially a microVax, but that flopped. Sure, Compaq may have bought the dregs, but it was a dead, rotted corpse by the time the company sign went down. That being said, they made some seriously bitchin hardware, that continues to be used to this day, and not just as central 'mainframes' for business/university users, but as embedded central processors in a lot of high tech (for the 80's) equipment. We keep an old PDP 8 CPU board on hand for an old CNC machine where I work. And getting the LS120 teletype to keep working.. whew !. (I personally miss the old "Cookie Monster" shell script...)
Once computers were purchasable by mere mortals rather than institutions, many people could noodle around with ideas of creativity (word processing, visualization, music, etc). Before those tasks could become foremost in the user's mind, the mechanisms for interacting with the computer (mouse, audio, visualization) had to become less onerous than the task the user was trying to accomplish.
You could make perfectly acceptable looking documents in WordStar or TeX, for instance - but trying to visualize the final look of the document as you're editing it became a serious problem. Of course, many would argue that that's what TeX was all about - concentrate on content rather than format - but I'd assert that separating content and format is not a "natural" way for humans to think. I guess my argument is that new technologies lowered the barrier to widespread computer use.
sloth jr
Back in the mid-80's, that's the way our univ. VAXen were serviced... some (well-groomed, btw) dudes in suits would show up, carefully remove and hang up their jackets, open up their stainless-steel tool cases and proceed to take the machines apart. As a lowly comp. sci. student, I marveled at what kind of technology allowed (and required!) the 'mechanics' to dress in three-piece suits.
WTF, does Microsoft expect me to update my scripts everytime it gets s new idea of how to do things?!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
But it comes down to what you can do during that uptime. No matter how much practice you have, you're not going to be able to do more than a few operations per second. My windows computer has had an uptime of almost twenty minutes (!) now, and it's probably done a simmilar amount of operations to your abacus.
Despite the flamebait-like subject...
I really do miss a number of things about VMS.
Logicals were wonderful, especially the fact that you could set them at the system and group levels as well as the user levels. Why didn't Unix ever do something like that? I should *not* have to reboot to set a system level variable?
I also prefered VMS's permission scheme.
Versioning built into the FS - aaaahhhhh.
The system tools, yes! The thing *came* with a system monitor that blew the doors off most of the things that have been added on like a bag to the side of Unix.
VMS had a *lot* to offer, as obviously did Unix. Too bad the two camps were always at each others' throats. Had they combined, *nix would kick Windows' butt even more than it already does.
In the mid-80s, around the time the XT or AT came out, someone (Boston Software?) came out with a VMS emulator that ran on top of DOS and gave you multiple logins via the serial ports. What ever happened to that?
OK, so it's been since the 80s in Atlanta since I've been in a VAX environment (sniff).
But that *was* the typical VAX support guy who showed up. White shirt, dark tie, short hair. You have to remember, their main target was companies who wished they could afford IBM, or who wanted to get away from IBM, or at the very least other, traditional computing environments.
It probably also matters where you are. Today, in Atlanta, I'd still expect the guy to look pretty much the same. If he showed up in Austin looking like that, except *maybe* at a bank, everyone would figure he was a singing telegram joke or a terrorist!
The only halfway good products to come out of Redmond are mice.
Those ships weren't CGI, they were physical models. When a ship blew up on-screen, they were litterally sticking explosives in a model ship and blasting it to hell.
You can see boxes around most of the ships in the original trilogy (less so in Return of the Jedi, though) where the background is a bit off-color. They pretty much glued the pictures of the model into the frame.
Laser and lightsabre effects were rotoscped, and not CGI.
To the best of my knowledge, there was no CGI whatsoever in episode 4 or 5, and at best, maybe the laser and lightsabre effects were CGI in episode 6, but I think they were still rotoscoping them.
The special editions had lots of CGI, but that's a different matter.
Forgot to mention: The disappearing spaceships (the big space battle in Return of the Jedi was full of magical ships that would vanish into nowhere, blow up without getting shot, skip a few frames, or fly backwards) was because they were inserted into the frames. It's like the glitches in stop-motin movies like Jason and the Argonauts. The more things you have moving, the easier it is to screw up a frame here and there, and the harder it is to catch those mistakes.
There was originally a water cooled version, but by using heatsinks that look like a bed of nails, and ducting the cooling air from a blower in the bottom of the unit to impinge individually on each heatsink ( the ducting is removed in the pic ) it was possible to ditch all the water cooling hardware.
These systems were meant for raised floor installations where chilled air was blown up thru missing floor panels, right into the fan intake.
And that is not a real service guy... he does not have a static strap!
It's kind of strange that the article makes no mention of HP Remarketing, which still provides parts and support.
I remember working at a university back in 99, when they decommisioned 2 VAX's. These VAX's were purchased in 86 and was giving an uptime around 13 years, no shutdowns, no reboots, no problems. To thing they replaced them with 6 NT 4 systems. The first week they were up, they had to be reboot multiply times and they became infected with a trojen horse. unfortionalty this first week became a normal week! I guess the university should remember the old statement: "If it's not broke don't fix it!"
A site cowboyneal will like http://www.freewebs.com/atpa/
Can't seem to remember the host name, though.
Circa 1995, they retired the VAX, and lucky folks got an account on the Convex "supercomputer."
Then the Convex's motherboard ["backplane," whatever] started acting all flaky [right around the time that Hewlett Packard purchased Convex], and they migrated everyone to an IBM AIX box [or cluster of boxes], known as isis.unc.edu, which is where they remain.
But back in the day, all the action was on the VAX.
The problem was that in order to crash a VAX, it had to be intentional. Kinda like you were saying.
With the help of a couple of buddies of mine during our CS assembly class, we poured through the documentation and wrote a memory worm, I.E. from straight out of Core Wars, we wrote "IMP" but for VAX-11 assembly. This is where you have the program make a copy of itself and transfer machine operation to the new copy you just made. This ends up filling all of RAM with a copy of itself, unless you have memory protections in place.
Then to make life a little bit more interesting, after running it under normal user mode with boring results like memory access errors, and running it under the VMS debugger utility to make sure it was doing what we wanted it to do, we fiddled with the processor status bits, including the "reserved" bits, changing the software to kernel mode and a couple of other "undocumented" features. We could run it without any software protection at that point. "Accidentily" we pressed the "Run" command in the debugger, then the system went down almost immediately... or at least nobody could get anything else to work.
Immediately we ran to the sysadmin and told the story to him. He thought we were off our rocker, and didn't believe us that we could shut down the system. After about a 1/2 hour, he decided to do a cold reboot of the VAX, after pulling out the manual for trying to figure out just how to do that. It still wouldn't reboot at that point. Finally, he had to re-install the OS from tape and rebuild the hard-drives from scratch, as if it were a fresh out-of-the-box computer (actually, worse than that). Because he was a pretty clueful sysadmin, he got everybody back up and going in about 2 days (regular tape backups of just about everything). This "club" of ours (we did register with college as a formal club... beer napkin, as the club charter, and all) still claimed "credit" for the mishap, but DEC said we were full of it and couldn't have done it. Since the computer was still under warentee at the time with essentially an unlimited service contract from DEC, it really didn't cost the school anything to deal with the issue, other than the downtime of the computer.
Yeah, we had fun with the VAX. I also loved the games of Pong and Breakout we made with the VT100 terminals (These are ASCII-only terminals). Weird glitches that would form every now and again because of time slices to other users, but otherwise pretty fun games. Not to mention Empire tournaments.
Well to reply to y'all then what can I say.
Stars ? STARS ! Now that would've been luxury. My family have lived in a hole in the ground for 7 generations (covered by the obligatory piece of musty tarpaulin) and you only got to surface 'n' see the stars on a Sunday (and then only if you'd been good)
To confound it all we had to "abacus" using grandpas Dougals propietary "ninary" system (He lost a finger in a scything accident) and all our figgurin' was done based round his high fallutin' new age "digital" system. The old galloot used to charge use a turnip each time we used it too ("that there's my intarlektual property son")
As for yer fancy Winders system and it's twenty minutes uptime well, when I was a lad we had to go out 'n' git our own viruses by kissin' Girls (and sailors). And that took a bit longer than 20 minutes I'll tell you (admittedly not much longer as the sailors round these parts have always been rather keen)
6 years uptime on a VAX. I ask you...
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Why would anyone want to migrate to the Inanium at this late date? Now that Intel finally caved and cloned AMD's 64-bit machines, the Itanium is clearly on the way out. That's not where you want to be three years from now. The Itanium is headed for the Intel scrap heap of wierd processors, along with the i860, the i960, and the iapx432. All of which were architecturally better than x86.
I haven't had to reboot my Windows 3.1 box for 10 years!!! Of course all I run notepad.
Whatever, as if anything running on VAX can be considered a complex system. When you run simple programs that really don't do a hell of a lot, you don't need to reboot. (i.e. the programs running on them can be considered to be very simplistic by today's standards) I'm not saying they don't do important work, it's just a different era.
It's like saying your wagon hasn't broken down on the 1 mile road to town for the past 100 years. But OOOHHHH look your pickup needed downtime after it traveled 200,000 miles in 1 year. THE WAGON IS SO MUCH BETTER!!!
Uptime is only important if there is no chance to improve your bottom line. So basically if you haven't had a need to upgrade in the last 6 years your company is going nowhere.
There comes a time to throw out the old shit no matter how well it did or is doing it's job. It's a sad truth. Grow, change, or die, that's business.
Is it me or has anything with "Open" in the brandname gone down the drain?
...
OSI (the stack), OpenVMS
We had a Cisco router wigging out the other month. Our Network Admin decided to reset it, and it offered this up:
Kodiak_Rtr uptime is 6 years, 9 weeks, 3 days, 10 hours, 43 minutes
System restarted by power-on
I always thought the worst part about VAX/VMS was the ODS-2(?) filesystem's limitation of no more than 5 (or 6?) nested subdirectories. Of course, you could (and do) get around this with logicals. There's some things that there's simply no equivalent to in *NIX world.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
But you can still buy a new one with support today!
There will still be plenty of VAX to go around for a long time.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Every time you pick the damn thing up it reboots (all the beads fall to 0).
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
My fondest memory working with VAX systems: hacking off plastic bits from 'standard' RJ-11 cables so they would fit VAX ports. That, and working next to the incessant whirr of a mainframe computer's fan is enough to remind me of the "good old days" ...
I am Jack's witty signature line
The story I heard was that DEC used to use UNIX as a diagnostic for VAX systems. Unlike VMS, UNIX was extremely sensitive to broken or flakey hardware. The UNIX philosophy was that if there was a hardware problem, the system paniced and you fixed the hardware. The operating system was written on he assumption that hardware problems were fatal errors.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I own KS10 system #4469, it still runs.
DEC Forever, WinTel Never! ^_^
(Hell, No! We won't go!)
Wow, I went to a smaller school, and we ran the entire C/S department with a single VAX 11/780. When it swelled to 100 or so concurrent users it was interminably slow and evil.
You guys must have had one big huge honking VAX compared to ours.
I've forgotten most of the quirks of the system by now, but it was definitely unlike most other OS's. I still remember the nightmare of mixing decnet and internet addressing though. =)
Still, the idea of them being phased out is kind of sad.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Never ever ever ever crashed.
Never ever had a incompatible piece of hardware.
vax basic + fms + rms + tpu
that"s the programming holy land
(Seriously, I'm pretty impressed with VMS in retrospect, though when I was using it as a high-school student it seemed as dense as, well, a rock.)
The "VAX Users See the Writing on the Wall" article brings up some interesting issues. However, it could have dug a bit deeper. The title, all by itself, deserves some comment. Most VAX "users" probably don't even know they are using a VAX. Many of them are likely using character-cell based applications that get the job done day in and day out. It is the whining of the VAX owners and application managers to which the article really dedicates itself.
Speaking of dedication, who can feel sorry for VAX owners who have let the whirlwind of the last decade keep them from paying attention to the critical systems and applications that keep their business going? The applications must be critical since someone noticed when the system finally crashed. The applications must be substantial since they have not already been replaced by some GUI/BlahScript solution whipped out in a couple weeks.
Come to think of it, past efforts have probably been attempted to replace the VAX based applications but have failed for any number of reasons. I am sure you know of at least one multi-million YourCurrency development effort that was slated to replace some legacy application that either failed to deliver or was cut before it could be implemented. For the applications that actually do get replaced, if they have just been simply replaced by some point-n-click poorly designed GUI, they seldomly seem "more efficient" than the past application.
The real issue goes much deeper than just one model of computer, like the VAX. For any organization, there might be some critical function busy spinning on some tough solid box sitting softly in some unseen corner or closet. It might be a VAX, but could also be an HP3000 or a 3B2 or maybe even a 486 clone. In a decade or less, it will be one of the sexy new systems we wish we could afford today.
United States
Please review these references from HP:
OpenVMS status a perspektiva
Enterprise Server Consolidation in the OpenVMS Environment
VMS was designed to be stable and to run on a narrow spectrum of reliable hardware. Windows, on the other hand, was designed to be cheap and to run on a broad range of "uncontrolled" hardware.
Personally I don't think trying to add security and stability as an afterthought is a good thing, but maybe it's just me. I mean, the gamingplatform called *nix is doing pretty well.
On the other hand, David N. Cutler worked for DuPont in the 60-ties. Who knows what kind of chemicals he got his hands on...
And yes, it's named after cheese. In my homenet (workgroup name: WENSLEYDALE) we currently have BRIE, GLOUCESTER, and STILTON. I needed some kind of consistent naming scheme, and was tired of Middle Earth.
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
Btw, that looked like a VAX 9000 that the guy was working on. A beautiful system but much slower than an Alpha.
See my journal, I write things there
I had the experience of working on a Digital Vax 11/750 back "in the day" at an organization of about 200 staff.
It was huge. It was the size of several washing machines side by side, it its own room, with its own separate air conditioner.
It had 4 MB *yes, MB* of RAM, and served data to about 50 workstations. (Green on black, Wyze terminals, as I recall)
This sucker had a GB of Disk Space. It's RAM was accessible via these dinner-plate sized memory 'cards' that slid into the monster case.
You could swap RAM without powering down the system. You ran a command to remap everything out of that card, and when the command was done, you pulled the card out.
It would identify bad RAM on the fly and then map around those bad spots, while writing to a log file for the sysadmin. It wouldn't skip a beat when this happened, either.
The Digital VAX was a true machine - one that, despite its refridgerator size and ~ X86 286 clas processing power, was to the 386 computers common at the time that I was there much like a VW Microbus is to an 18-wheeler Semi.
The Air Conditioner failed, one time. Eventually, the computer room got too hot and the system crashed. But, when it did so, it remapped all the memory to disk.
When we brought the disk back up, (after getting the A/C fixed by an HVAC) all the processes running at the time of crash came back up! We had to manually kill them!
I heard about the story of its delivery. It was actually fell out of the back of the truck on the open highway at about 60 MPH. The agent took it back to the shop, put a new panel on the side, threw it back on the truck, (raising the tailgate this time) and delivered it about 2 hours late. It ran fine when they hooked it up!
It's simply a degree of engineering lost to today's Windows and *nix raised lusers.
I will always respect that VAX. It was a machine for and from a different era of computing.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Back in 1989-92, when I was at Aston University, we used to have a few VAX/VMS systems: two 11/750s {may have been 780s} and a cluster of two 8650s. I remember writing a few programmes in DCL {think the power of bash, the verbosity of COBOL}, VAX Pascal {which was kind of similar to Turbo Pascal} and FORTRAN. I also wrote what eventually ended up becoming a very popular "alternative" user guide. But my real claim to fame is that I also wrote a programme on that VAX -- I'm not sure what language it was in, might even have been BASIC -- which passed a rough-and-ready Turing test, simulating what could only be described as a precursor to today's internet chat rooms. Unfortunately, the tester was someone to whom the phrase "sharpest knife in the drawer" could hardly be applied, so the test probably was not valid.
R.I.P., VAX.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
... for fun and profit.
I remember once back in the late 80s when my then employer took part in a local computer show. We used a brand new MicroVAX II (in the Q3 enclosure with wheels) to demo our 'ware on. Myself and an another tech brought the machine to the show, so we made a deal with some cow-orkers in the sales dept. that they would bring it back. Big mistake.
Naturally, my tech friend and I carefully loaded the VAX into a station wagon and drove it to the venue, even though it really wasn't far, all the while going carefully over bumps in the road etc.
The next day, as we were heading out to lunch, we saw (and heard!) a strange spectacle coming up our street. There came the two sales droids happily pushing the VAX ("but it's got wheels so what's the problem!?") over the rough asphalt, over cobblestones and... you get the picture. They were going fast too, the thing was shaking and vibrating so bad we heard it more than saw it.
Did the thing work after this? Yup, it booted right up without a hickup.
A friend of mine once dropped a MicroVAX I (he was carrying it down some stairs). The cabinet looked like a train wreck, but after some industrial adjustment with a hammer and some crazy glue for the plastic bits it worked just fine. The QBUS cards were all fine as they came flying out of the enclosure upon impact.
Oh yeah, and then there was the time at an earlier employer when one of the networking guys accidentaly laid a VAX 11/785 (with UNIBUS cabinet) on its side. He was adding some cable or whatever and removed all the floor tiles (not every second one as he should have) from immediately behind the VAX. This meant the VAX was only resting on some relatively thin metal rods which suddenly didn't have any sideways support anymore so they started giving... you could see the VAX moving slowly backwards and then suddenly crashing into the next VAX (an 8600) behind it.
Here's the thing: Both VAXen kept running.
I once decomissioned a MicroVAX II (Q5) that had an uptime of over 4 years. It had been used heavily almost 24/7 (for compiling) until it was replaced by a 3600. No cluster, no redundant hw, just a lone machine built from the best components the computer industry has ever seen.
You know what they used to say about DEC Engineering? That their motto was: "When in doubt, use the biggest capacitor available". Or what they used to say about DEC Sales? That if you tried to call a DEC salesdriod they would immediately demand: "How did you get this number?!?"
For a top notch engineering company they sure as hell didn't market their stuff very well. Ah well, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.
G
You know, after seeing 6+ years of uptime, it reminds me of an old article about a server at UNC that was running, responding to pings, but nobody knew where it physically was. Turns out that during a remodeling of a building, this particular server happened to get closed in between two walls. It took the IT staff of the school and some guys from Cisco to find this server. It was up for like 4+ years. I can't remember what OS it was running, but no matter what, that's impressive!
Me fail English? That's unpossible!
A microvax I worked with would have been up a continuous 8 years if it were not for a major power failure in November 1994.
In 1988 the system disk was replaced with a spare that somehow kept running until the system was taken out of service in 1999 (IIRC). (I still use the same model drive with another ancient pre-PC.)
The microvax was always supposed to be replaced but no one ever got around to it until just before the site was closed.
I am told that a VAX-11/780 also onsite never crashed and that this was typical.
And that a Data General mini, with boot rom, also was running constantly for 7+ years, interrupted only by power failures, even though it was actually idle for 99% of the time.
Your suggestion is interesting. Since the NT kernel is a re-implementation of the VAX kernel, they probably could put a VAX API on top and remove some of the instability that Win32 introduces.
The # of times those thoughts go through my head... I guess I must be a bit of a luddite, yet working in I.T. It's still the promise of solving problems and coming up with elegant solutions that keeps me going I guess. And just to be even more ot, what I would really like is a monitor with clear text. Not fancy graphics, clear readable text for these old eyes.
Let's see, what did I do today. Logged into my VAX 6630 cluster, it was still working. Checked my other 6 VAX/micro-VAXen servers, still working. Changed the UCX SMTP config to use the new gateways, no reboots required. modified the backup tape script to write HTML then copy to the OSU web server, hi-tech stuff today.
The fan on the D/R box (used to be live) eventually packed in after 15 yrs continuous usage this week. Shoddy quality there.
Some of our systems only have 2 years uptime. We physically moved them to new datacenters 2 yrs ago. Even VAXen are not magic.
Approximate cost to migrate apps of these servers - high millions. Really! One app alone is going to cost about 15 big ones. It's a home grown highly specialised thing. T'other is a staff rostering system used by thousands of staff.
My next computer is going to be a 5 node micro-VAXen cluster. When we decommision the beasts.
I'm ashamed to realize that I forgot my DEC employee number. :-(
;)
I went to work for DEC as a computer operator in late '89 at the Cupertino, CA. chip plant where they manufacturered the M-sets for the VAX9000. To the guy who mentioned that "they used to be water cooled". Part of the engineering challenge was an air cooled mainframe from the drawing board. Air cooled mainframes of that class was the goal.
DECnet being the VMS system data-bus for peripheral devices, virtually any peripheral device, was for me, the "neato" factor. Washing machine sized "hubs", washing machine sized tape drives and refrigerator sized disk cabinet as far as the eye could see.
I remember using a MicroVAX to "join" a DECnet node cluster so that I could look at certain privileged files on one of bigger nodes. The results? It worked. The outcome? I would have gotten away with it if I had cleanly removed the MicroVAX from the cluster. About a dozen complaints later, the System Managers came looking for the MicroVAX causing a bottleneck. I was able to keep the MicroVAX by letting them know how I did it. Fortunate for me, it wasn't anything more complicated than the fact that DECnet would simply let *any* node join a cluster.
The Alpha was DEC's savior but they insisted on marketing it as a Windows server platform. Olsen never saw the decline of the mainframe market coming and the DEC marketing geeks were too mainframe market oriented (read that as "high margin revenue, long term contract") and rubbed elbows too closely with government types. This developed a "build it and they will buy it" mindset. Change was sluggish at DEC and that is being kind.
Mod me troll, if you must, I can't help it.
Now This is a long running system!!
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I recall a statement by Ken Olsen, founder of DEC, saying something like, "We like & support Unix. All those programmers who use Unix will eventually get tired of playing with a toy operating system, and then they'll want to use a real operating system, like VMS."
- sorry, I googled around but didn't find the original quotation.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Thanks. I always wanted more details and I appreciate the info.
Or just reasonable hardware. For a project I helped set up around 1998, we put a bunch of Sparc/Solaris systems -- desktop models, some of which were already several years old at the time -- in a data center rack and started various server packages on them. I wouldn't call these clustered, as each is doing a different set of tasks. I took a quick peek last month and I believe some of them hadn't been rebooted since the Y2K patches were applied over 4 years ago.
I am aware of other desktop-model Sparcstations that have been rebooted occasionally but their total power-off time is probably less than 2 hours since they were unpacked in 1995.
The things are built like tanks.
FWIW the Ground control system for ESA's latest earth monitoring satellite Envisat runs on VAX/OpenVMS/FORTRAN at ESOC.
It works fine so there was no need to upgrade but due to the up-coming VAX end of life it will be skipping over the possiblilty of Alphas to use the Itanium under Alpha emulation.