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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.
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.
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.
the_VAX_writing_is_on_wall.txt;252
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 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.)
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?
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 !
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 ]
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.
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
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...
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.
...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!
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.
Uhh, anything with that kind of uptime almost by definition has to be a clustered system. There is too much potential for things like a backplane to fail. Everytime I see an uptime over a couple years it is invariably a VAX or S/390 or other large system sysplex where it is the cluster that has been up and running continuously for that long, not necessarily a single system. Of course the whole point of large systems like those is that you CAN have uniterrupted access to the system for years at a time.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It's a VAX. They're older than commercial electricity. Obviously he had his own gas-fired generator running it :)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
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)
My understanding is that the hamsters are just about dead after 6 years of continuous running.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
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/
... 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