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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!"
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
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.
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.
the fact that VAX is still around is a testament to how damn well engineered those machines are.
And the fact that DEC, the company that build those VAXen, went tits-up five years ago is a testament to how unprofitable it is to build machines that are engineered so well that they never need to be replaced...
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.
Dunno about that particular facility, but Hughes Aircraft Company (since swallowed by the abominable Raytheon) had a facility built in the 60's that used multiple diesel generators for long term outages and a mechanically coupled flywheel electrical feed for their critical computer systems. From how my father described it, it was a large electric motor attached to a generator with a 6-foot diameter reinforced concrete flywheel between them. The kinetic energy stored in the flywheel easily maintained consistenet power during brownouts, and gave four or five minutes of power if the power went out completely-- enough time for the diesel generators to start. One of the engineers my father worked with called it "inertial backup power".
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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/
Way more interesting is the SDS 940 emulator; first machine I ever played with. Discrete transistor and diode logic. My old friend Bob Long had written an assembler and an application for it - half of the 8k word core tank was used for his "calculator", an infinite precision calculator that worked in any base between 2 and 32. When I first typed "9**81" and watched the ASR 33 typing out three rows of numbers, I knew what my career would be right then and there. It had room to store one constant; taking the 81'st root of the result took about two hours, followed by a bell, the bang of the teletype and the number 9.
Bob had an old AM transistor radio tuned to the end of the dial, sitting on top of the M register (a couple of large, heavy cards) and we could hear the calculation's progress. Handled fractional roots, too. Computing in 1969; Them Waz The Dayz.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
... 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