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An Interview With Mark Gorham Of OpenVMS
Ken Farmer writes "There's already been one press interview with Mark Gorham, but that encounter with HP's VP of the OpenVMS Systems Division omitted some technical details that warrant further attention. Hence, SKHPC thought it appropriate to go on a deep dive with one experienced in OpenVMS and SCUBA diving as well."
If your camera was based on open standards you could port OpenVMS to it.
Is as secure as an attack-trained Rottweiler embedded in a block of black Lucite... ... and about as useful....
From the article: "...between 10 to 15 percent of our business comes for accounts that are new to OpenVMS"
I was under the impression that most companies would want to be migrating away from OpenVMS. Anybody have any good reasons why a company would want to adopt it nowadays?
Never attribute to stupidity what can be construed as a monopoly preservation tactic.
"...pretty popular in the low-end market (1-8 CPUs, up to 64GB of memory..."
/., if even in a linked-to article, where for the longest time a 4 way box was considered xtR3m3 (or whatever the l33t spelling would be these days).
Yup. Its refreshing to actually see opinions like this acknoledged on
And no, there's not really much of a need for a beowolf cluster of those things. Imagine a life instead. Mmm... isn't that nicer?
Yeah, yeah, flamebait...
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
-1 Sleep.
There going to provide some tools that make porting Unix applications easier to VMS, but they didn't say anything about making VMS Posix complient. Improvements to VMS opperating system have been around in Linux and Solaris for ages.
It would seem that VMS is still interesting primarily as the operating system you had to uninstall when you were installing Unix on a Vax and, from a design point of view, as the unholy god-parent of Windows NT.
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/19/2 236202
Mark who? I don't know his name. I worked for DEC VMS Engineering in the VAX and Alpha days, who is this guy?
This article makes it seem like the idea of building unix apps on VMS is a new thing. It's not. VMS Posix was available in 1992, and many Unix/C apps would just compile and run. It was very cool.
The dinosaur is aging very well.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
We have a VaxCluster of VaxServer 4000's that is now about 10 years old, supports 300 users on an old legacy ALLIN1 system that they access on their PC's using Powerterm. The users love the system, a replacement system would cost maybe £250000 to write & implement, if it ain't broke why fix it? I think we can count the downtime in those 10 years in minutes instead of hours.
:D
Only downside is that I suspect those suckers don't half use a lot of electricity
Jonathan
I really enjoyed using OpenVMS and although I no longer use it on a daily basis I do still have an account on a friend's system that I log into from time to time. That interview reminded me of how wonderfully supportive the OpenVMS community is, even if you don't like OpenVMS you have to love the spirit, dedication and willingness to help of these guys. I especially remember the USENET posts by the recently departed John Wisniewski. Here is one of his posts in which he names the top "F" reasons OpenVMS is not going to die.
There's a lot of stuff in VMS that's still extremely nifty. Self tuning, stability and consistency across the OS. Nope, it's not a sexy OS, but sometimes you need something reliable.
A decade on and we still use VMS in my current organisation. While I'm busy worrying about patch levels on my Windows systems, battling spyware and having to roll out increasingly complex and powerful systems just to keep up, our warehouse just runs on VT510s and OpenVMS. Reliably. If anything ever goes wrong, you can betcha it's not the OS.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
Nowadays it is not common to have hardware available to install OpenVMS or any other VMS flavor. This project allows users to create free accounts in a OpenVMS cluster. I have created one for me and I'm trying to learn a little of this system, which looks like very interesting.
If you want to get started at OpenVMS this book is recommended. It is very basic and for beginners.
-- Gustavo
What a way to go. Tied to an old DEC VAX and dropped at sea...
I started working on VMS systems in 1997, so I was a relative latecomer to the OS. Still, I quickly learned to appreciate what it's capable of. The ancient hardware I've got in my garage (VAX 6000, VAXstation 3100s, MicroVAX IIs, AlphaStation 200) is capable of more useful and reliable clustering, out of the box, than Windows 2000 AS. Almost undoubtedly better than 2003 as well.
I've had to migrate a legacy VMS application to a Windows 2000 AS cluster, and after 10 years of operation with no more than a few hours' downtime at any given time, the old Alpha cluster is ready to be shut down next week. It's sad to see it go - the Windows version will probably never be as solid and reliable, but what counts to management is that for the price of annual hardware and software maintenance on the old cluster we can buy all new Dell servers with 3-year warranties every year or two.
I did once set up an OpenVMS machine with the intent of taking it to DefCon, but never got around to it. Others did, though, and there's nothing like watching a bunch of hotshot Unix crackers pounding their heads on their keyboards out of frustration.
(And that's just trying to get a volume listing, not breaking in!)
Just to save all you other OCD victims out there when asked to reply in 50 words or less Mark Gorham replies in 38, assuming OpenVMS counts as one.
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
I looked and looked but could not find whether or not a 64 bit x86 version of open vms is available.
It would be great to run it on an opteron or even create a LiveOpenVMS boot/run from dvd/cd rom version.
Cutler's original kernel was written in assembler. I assume that it was completely replaced with something in C. Was this done for VMS 5, or later (for the Alpha port)?
Was VMS designed with clustering in mind from the start? Did clusters really get going with v5?
Although, for a guy who implemented his kernel in assembler, Cutler's comment that UNIX "is a junk OS designed by a committee of Ph.D.s" is a little shaky, even if he was the project leader for Windows NT.
From my read of TFA, he's a pure, generic, product-manager. And Shannon sounds like his PR bitch. Yech.
Me, I'm waiting for VMS to stabilize, before migrating my RSX-11M apps there. Just kidding! The apps actually run on IAS. Anyway, Cutler's OSes just got worse and worse, until he finally hit the gutter with NT. He shoulda stuck with TOPS-10 at that chemical company.
I miss the days when I worked on the old VAX mainframes running VMS.... Then again I also kinda miss my old Commodore VIC-20....
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for the are subtle and quick to anger.
The people I have known who ran VMS were all physicists and electrical engineers who had large amounts of legacy Fortran code that they didn't want to port, and for which the VMS Fortran compiler was said to be superior to anything available for UNIX at the time. I wonder to what extent eople actually like VMS as an OS and to what extent its survival is due to heritage code?
Many, many posts come from people who have _never_ touched OpenVMS. For these people, I invite you to the Deathrow OpenVMS Cluster. This is a OpenVMS cluster (running OpenVMS 7.2) or VAXen and Alphas. It's free for use by the general public. Yes - you get access to the compilers (COBOL, Java, C, FORTRAN, BASIC, MACRO, and much more!). The entire point of the system is for people unfamiliar with OpenVMS to have the change to _play_ with OpenVMS.
Check out http://deathrow.vistech.net for how to open your own account.
OpenVMS 6.2 on some VAX machine that I always forget the model number of (the door is removed and I never have to look at it.)
Due to the contract maintenence cost for what it is really used for now (inter-office e-mail of all things) I am trying to get rid of it, re-educate employees who still use WP 5.1 to use a PC and OO.org or MS Office.
OpenVMS is great. Old DEC hardware cannot be beat. So it is a shame I will never use either again, nor would I want to.
Does anyone know of a complete list of Alpha boxes that can run OpenVMS? I have searched for this before and never found anything conclusive. The last one I found said that none of the Personal Workstation series would run OpenVMS. This while I had PWS 500 under my desk at work running OpenVMS. My understanding is that none of the NT capable Alphas will work.
Cluster applications do not need to be cluster aware or written in any special fachion. All cluster resources are potentially usable by any program running on any node at any time. Clusters are easily scalable both in CPU horsepower and number of processors. Great gobs of system resources do not need to be allocated to run the pretty GUI desktop in order to run the cluster.
From an old Slashdot post of mine, VMS 0wnz the 24X7 911 Emergency Dispatch market:
Oh, and VMS has this thing called a versioning file system, that, as far as I know, is still pretty much unique in the industry: With a versioning file system, you can, at least in theory, keep a history of all the "deltas", or "increments" to a file, so that you have, at least in theory, a record of every state the file has ever been in.
Plus, if you know the Windows NT kernel, you pretty much know the VMS kernel [wink wink].
Well I know Water systems in many cities use VMS.. would you want Windows running the pumps that bring water to your house?
What could be more intuitive?
I looked and looked but could not find whether or not a 64 bit x86 version of open vms is available.
VMS presumes CPU functionality that does not exist in x86. Mainly, this has to do memoy management and "ring" protection.
A VMS engineer told us (at an Oracle Rdb conference in Nashua) that Intel purposfully made certain parts of the Itanium look like the VAX. That made it possible to port VMS to Itaniac.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
If VMS also worked on Alpha, what were the barriers for VMS that allowed UNIX to gain more share? UNIX was expensive back then, so unless VMS was really expensive, that couldn't have been a barrier. Was it just DEC's infamous marketing dept.? It seems that other comments make VMS out to be a pretty nice OS.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
A x86-64 version is not available (nor does it appear to be planned) at this time...though things could change in the future.
Apparently the port from Alpha to IA64 went very smoothly and enough was done along the way that porting to another hardware architecture would take little time.
There is a free hobbyist licence available for VMS (includes compilers, etc...) if you are really interested in giving VMS a try (you have to pay a nominal amount for the media as the o/s et. al. are not downloadable). The licence restricts use to non-commercial usage and is currently available for VAX and Alpha hardware. See http://www.openvmshobbyist.org for details.
Inexpensive Alpha's can be had on Ebay or via some used equipment dealers (see www.islandco.com for one). If you want to build a single-image cluster of 96 machines with 96 processors each, spread over distances of 500+ miles so you can have transparent disaster-recovery and failover for serving your personal web site, basketball pool, or anything else you can think of, then VMS is your kind of operating system.
Lots of 'unix' programs can be easily ported to VMS. Lots of 'unix' tools are already available within VMS.
Assistance with VMS can be found at comp.os.vms or www.openvms.org or www.encompassus.org
You're right.. But lets throw in some other highly confusing commands....
... and ...
SHOW USERS
COPY
DIRECTORY
SHOW PROCESSES
HELP
I know, hard stuff to grasp.. You'll get it one day.
I don't know, certainly not "ls"
For a long time Digital had the .edu market mostly locked up despite BSD and other unix variants. Then they got greedy in the .edu space by charging large fees for the o/s when it had been either free or nearly so. That toasted the .edu market for them and the breeding ground for many VMS-conversant users.
Then Sun cam along and offered better price/performance, which Digital declined to match either through inertia, stupidity, or hubris.
Many organizations did NOT want to switch from VMS, but when it became apparent that they could save a bundle by doing so, well the bit the bullet, spent a lot of money to porting their apps to unix, but were left without a lot of things that the VMS environment supplied 'for free', which had to be bought and layered on to unix to provide equivalent functionality. If you did the math at the time - as I was reuqired to do where I worked - unix with all the extras we needed to buy was more expensive than staying with VMS - so we stayed put. Other companies found that their needs favored a unix solution.
Then through most of the 90's there was the DEC/Compaq non-marketing departments and deals with the devil (Microsoft).
I've worked on SunOS, Solaris, AIX, Tru64, and Linux and still find VMS to be my favorite for heavy-duty production use. I've spent a lot of time with Solaris and while it's ok, I prefered Tru64. AIX was just not my idea of fun.
You really owe it to yourself to give VMS a try. There's a free hobbyist licence available (see another post near this one for details), so pickup a used Alpha (you can always run Linux on it if you decide to) and give VMS a whirl.
It's easy to use and administer, and for the most part the command language (DCL) is english, not acronym. "Help" at the command prompt is the equivalent to 'man'.
SEVMS had a B1 rating - NOT a B2 rating. VMS could never have gotten a B2 rating, due to inherent covert channel problems in the lock manager.
The company I was working for in 1979 put an order in for a VAX/11-780 which we received in 1980. It was VAX serial number 21. The tech guy installing it said that the first 18 were for internal DEC use. It came with two RM80 (80Mb disks), 256K Mem, an expansion cabnet and a vacuum column 9 track tape drive... All for about $320K USD.
The back plane was all wire-wrap and the CPU was contained on four of the cards that plugged into the back-plane. The micro code wad uploaded from an 8" floppy loaded in a PDP-11/03 which resided in the lower portion of the main cabnet.
To make a long story short, this was one of the best systems I ever administered. The DEC people were professional and tech support was excelent.
It was a sad day to see DEC go...
But you can run a vax emulator on X86.. Charon Vax. It runs vms quite well. As for the original question of 64bit... I would have to say that it doesn't exist - yet - to my knowledge.
Thanks for your reply. I'd go get an Alpha, but I already have several SPARCs and a PC and am meeting spousal resistence in getting more...
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Your post: "Plus, if you know the Windows NT kernel, you pretty much know the VMS kernel [wink wink]."
My puzzlement: Windows NT == VMS? Really? Are you serious?
More of a stab at M$FT - I think the gentleman's agreement they reached was that DEC wouldn't sue them over theft of proprietary trade secrets [i.e. theft of "Intellectual Property"] if M$FT agreed to port NT to Alpha hardware.
But as to the underlying question of the NT kernel: Folks, it ain't all that bad. In just about every test anyone ever throws at it, the NT kernel bitch slaps the competition.
Compare e.g.:
Now the decision in NT 4.0 to break the pure client/server model, and bring the windows/graphics stuff into "Ring 0", may have contributed to some system instability [particularly if you're using a bleeding-edge video card], and the NT Domain/Active Directory network infrastructure may be a pale imitation of a true directory like what Novell can offer you, but the underlying Windows NT kernel itself ain't nothing to laugh at.VMS keeps coming back, and appearing on Slashdot like a bad penny.
To be perfectly honest, the same can be said of UNIX. UNIX (and a variety of UNIXalikes) was in steep decline in the early 1990s. In quite a few techie circles it was looked at as outdated, awkward technology. And now of course all UNIX-like operating systems are completely dead.
Covert channel problems in the lock manager?
Sounds like what the RA80 (and RA81) disk suffered from!
I know plenty about SEVMS and its B2 security level rating as well as the circa-1992 VIP (VMS Integrated POSIX). I left this information out of the article because many of its intended readers don't know C2 from B2, and that VIP didn't cut it as a UNIX development environment. Better to keep things simple, the interview was long enough as it was. I didn't have the time to go down so many ratholes that an article became a book. (Been there, done that, didn't want to do it again yesterday.)
If VMS is a dinosaur, what's UNIX? It's an OS created 10 years prior to VMS, making it a Older Dinosaur. Neither of these dinosaurs are extinct, both have evolved. VMS can do things today that I had no clue it would be able to do today. Same goes for UNIX.
I don't know Mark Gorham's position or job title in the VAX and Alpha days, but he's currently the VP of HP's OpenVMS Division.
Cheers,
Terry Shannon
IT Consultant and Publisher, Shannon Knows HPC
last i looked they seemed tobe saying an amd64 port was uneccicary since itaniums were fine but now intel looks to be killing them i wonder if they will port to consumer hardware
Yep. DECs infamously inept marketing. They had the best engineered solutions that money could buy (a lot of money) but they could not sell to save themselves. So sad.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Where I work we run two vt220's still.
One monitors a terminal server and the other monitors an old DEC "Infoserver" (tower of x1 SCSI CDROMS).
I think the manufacturing date on those vt220's is 1983 or 1984.
The killer blow was when the architect of VMS, Dave Cutler, moved over to Microsoft.
Security suffered from the transition because Vax/VMS had KESU shells and the Intel platform didn't support the Exec mode. Each shell had specific instructions that could only run in that shell, and it's own discrete address space. A user program couldn't write to the kernel, or to a device driver, or to any structures managed by the Supervisor layer. Since user mode exe's were not able to reach protected address spaces where the other bits lived, exploits were few and far between.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
DEC tried to kill VMS with the Risky Windows NT Affinity Scheme, VMS customers weren't drinking that Kool-Aid.
Compaq was clueless about VMS, and simply wished this cash cow would go away. Customers kept the cow in the pasture.
HP did the math and figured that divesting a ~$4B annual revenue stream offering consistently high margins would be downright stupid. HP didn't do much in the way of trying to attract new customers outside of a handful of "key target markets," but new customers from new markets were attracted to VMS by word-of-mouth. The words came from the mouths of existing VMS customers.
DEC projected an erosion of the existing VMS customer base. What DEC neglected to factor in was the fact that the inevitable emigration was offset by an unexpectedly high immigration rate. The immigration was spurred by endorsements of existing customers.
Tom Sawyer conned other people into painting his fence and paying for the right to do so. VMS customers served as a free advertising channel and thwarted Corporate Policy by ensuring that that VMS fence wasn't torn down.
Customer loyalty is what has kept VMS alive and returned the "dead" OS to growth mode.
As for Kevin Mitnick, he was far better at theft than OS hacking. He gained access to VMS via "social engineering," not direct hackery. He conned a secretary into divulging a password that granted him access to a privileged account. Once he got into the account, he obtained instant system management authority (the VMS equivalent of a UNIX sysadmin with root access). He then chose to download the entire VMS code base, for reasons best known to himself. Digital was not happy about the fact that some joker ripped off high value intellectual property. IMHO Mitnick should not be testifying before Congress; he should be testifying at yet another annual parole hearing.
IT Consultant and Publisher, Shannon Knows HPC
"In quite a few techie circles it was looked at as outdated, awkward technology."
Little of the core technology has changed. Unix has somehow become cool, but hasn't really escaped the 1970's mindset it was created in. It's like the Volkswagen Bug of the OS world, so ugly it's beautiful.
If VMS is a dinosaur, what's UNIX?
Well, going by current evolutionary theory, UNIX would be a bird.
VMS would be too by now, if Olsen had handed over the reins to someone who was able to adapt to the new environment.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Some of us remember when students spent often months or years to port their thesis project from one unix to another one. BSD, Ultrix, Digital Unix, OSF/1, Tru64, now HP/UX or maybe Solaris, SunOS, AIX, FreeBSD, NetBSD, or Linux. You name it. Even two Linux versions from different distributors are not compatible. Not to mention the time wasted with miserable tools like gdb, dbx etc.. Every time the new system was The Future system. And every time it was migration season, followed by a rude awakening. Not only did the names change. Even most simple things like string manipulation changed. Sure you can write an ANSI C application, but unfortunately that is not always Posix compatible. Remember Posix? THE unix standard - dream. How much frustration. If you spend your valuable time on doing the Unix-to-Unix migration yourself, then you will find out the truth! There are research projects which spent years just on porting their software from one unix to another unix flavor, just to realize that the funding agencies had enough.
(Open)VMS is and will always be VMS, not Unix. There is only one VMS standard. That is good! It saved many smart people a lot of time.
Remember what was one of the most important reasons for universities to drop VMS in the past? Licenses! But let's do a reality check: today universities and labs pay tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for RedHat Linux. They really do! Sure, some students know they can download Linux for free. But do they tell their advisor that they spend weeks and months on installation, configuration, updates and other daily trouble? Let's be honest!
Did you know that you can get a VMS compatible computer with Alpha processor at eBay for cheap and, the VMS licenses from HP even for free? VMS is professional software. That includes compilers and many other first class tools. VMS software tools are excellent. And if you want it really cheap, then replace the hardware with an emulator for free (like SIMH), just to get started today. So you get all you need to study a modern alternative. For free!
Why would any student want to miss what experts appreciate at stock exchanges, agencies like the NSA, health care providers, and many other places were performance, reliability, security and organization is everything? These experts know why they use VMS. Do you know what you are missing? The lemmings follow the lemmings who have seen only one system, or maybe two, and pretend to be experts. If Linux Master Installer or MCSE and an average curriculum vitae is not good enough for you, then have a look at VMS.
Remember why people ditched VMS? That's right. Licenses. Ironical, isn't it?
One more question for the women among the students here: would you ever call for a "man" or even type "man" into a computer to get help? :-) Well, on a VMS system you enter HELP and help is what you get. A lot of excellent help!
Now, move your mouse cursor to http://www.openvmsedu.com/ if you are a student or teacher. Talk to your school! And those of you who like to be more than dead meat at the weekend go to http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/ This is cool free stuff from experts.
Oh, and of course the Bill Gates followers find themselves home at http://www.trustworthycomputing.com/
Cheers!
Wow. I think I talked to you like in 1990 or 1991 when I was tring to find a tinyfugue client for VMS and you took the time to point me in the right direction. How 2 be a dinosaur ;)
I did a little bit of Fortran back in '93 on VMS. If I remember correctly, each file of the VMS filesystem had a version number, which was incremented automatically by the system, each time the file was changed.
It was such a useful feature! I haven't seen it anywhere else. It meant that you did not need to worry about previous versions and backups when coding an application.
This feature could solve lots of problems in todays system:
1) the DLL hell would not exist, if applications used versioned libraries.
2) source-control systems would be easier to make. For trivial cases, locking a file for editing would be enough.
You can't beat good ol' I.T.S.
Many of the features mentioned, and originally no passwords!
http://www.its.os.org/
(emulations available).
It gave birth to EMACS after all!!!
The thing I remember most from 10 years as a VMS Sysaadmin and programmer were the arrival of the software upgrades. Even the decimal-point upgrades (eg. 5.4 to 5.5) arrived in huge cardboard boxes containg dozens of grey manuals and TK50s.
Then there was a couple of days to read the release notes, followed by the installation, which almost always went smoothly. I'm tempted to buy a VAXstation from Ebay.
Maybe you're more comfortable with C:\>DIR C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 ?
It's on the OpenVMS Freeware distribution; a compressed version is available at:
6 0_ 1.zipe ware60_ 2.zip
6 0/ bliss/
URL:http://h71000.www7.hp.com/freeware/freeware
URL:http://h71000.www7.hp.com/freeware/fre
Or you can browse Bliss32 at:
URL:http://h71000.www7.hp.com/freeware/freeware
I guess you can tell by my ID what I think of VMS. Yes, VMS may not have a slick interface but companies are in business to make money, not to provide their employees with a platform for playing Doom. And if your business needs a back end system that is always up, regardless of load, VMS systems are just the ticket.
I manage VMS systems that process diagnostic tests. Nearly every company in the diagnostic testing industry uses VMS platforms. It's an honest-to-gosh 7x24x365 business. I'm pretty sure that if you needed a blood test for a critical health emergency at 3 AM on a Sunday or Christmas day or at some other odd time, you wouldn't want to take a chance on some toy system that may or may not be functional. We process hundreds of thousands of tests every night and every single one of those tests have someone waiting, and not to be over-dramatic, sometimes with their life hanging in the balance. This is the space where VMS is, by far, the best solution.
They shipped versions up to and including 4.0 without doing proper buffer size checks in system calls. That's pretty awful really, any software executing on the machine had the ability to arbitrarily scribble on things, cause kernel-side faults etc. The main thing that protected them was that most Windows programmers never interacted with the (unprotected) NT system calls, they just used the higher level Win32 APIs. In Window 2000 the problem was restricted to a few dozen syscalls that do unusual things with memory. Harder to exploit, but probably possible.
Do you have any URLs or Google keywords that would give me a little more info as to what you're talking about?
I mean, they did get C2 certification pretty early on:
Are you saying that the industry was aware that there were [intentionally, not accidentally] ill-behaved library calls, and that the NCSC still awarded them C2?Or are you saying that M$FT lied to the NCSC? Or maybe that the NCSC is a bunch of morons and C2 is meaningless?
There was a Jurassic Era in which T-Rex was the biggest and baddest. All that remains of T-Rex V1.0 is fossils and a few skeletons in the world's best museums of science.
There was a Jurassic Park, which was a work of fiction by Michael Chricton (and not one of his best, either). All sorts of dinosaurs roamed that fictional evolutionary leap forward into the past. The theatrical verion was worse than the book, and you're more likely to see black helicopters hovering over your house than you are to have a close emcounter of the worst kind with a rabid velicoraptor, or whatever those things were called.
In the IT industry, dinosaurs can evolve. The mainframe did, as did VMS amd UNIX. They aren't new, but they sure are improved and have adapted quite nicely. They are neither obsolete nor extinct. The Commodore VIC-20, which materialized in the 1980s--well after mainframes and VMS and UNIX showed up--is both obsolete and extinct. And nobody's booting any OS on a Convex or PRIME box any more.
So being a VMSasaurus Version 8.2 isn't a bad thing to be ;-}
IT Consultant and Publisher, Shannon Knows HPC
VMS and UNIX are still alive and kicking. VMS would be in a much stronger position had Ken Olsen ceded command of DEC before he was ousted. DEC itself might still exist had Ken stepped aside several years earlier than he was exiled.
IT Consultant and Publisher, Shannon Knows HPC
Lectori salutem is the first i say when i log in.
I started working with VAXen in 1989. The hospital that I worked for had a LAVc (Local Area VAXcluster) running on a 6230, two MicroVAX 3600s and three 3500s.
The two 3600s were connected to a packet-switched network for rudimentary TCP/IP connectivity to other hospitals in the network. (Government: I worked for the VA.) The contract had changed and we had to pull out one vendor's connection and install a different vendor's connection.
The vendor we were dropping came by to deinstall the equipment and was working behind the servers. I was in the machine room at my desk when I heard all of the consoles start beeping and printing at once. I went over to them and asked the tech what happened. He sheepishly looked up with the power-cable for one of the 3600s in his hand, saying "Oops!"
I told him to plug it back in and I waited for the cluster to finish its transition before rebooting the downed node. Took about 20 minutes to boot and it was back online.
No user calls. We were down for about 30 minutes on that node. The users barely noticed. The worst that happened was that those users on the downed node simply logged back into the cluster and picked up where they left off. No lost data. Very little lost time.
Nowadays, I administer UNIX servers. Why? Not because I feel they're more reliable than VMS. Mainly because I can make more money that way. Nobody wants to pay me as much to administer VMSclusters.