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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."
I don't think it's necessarily more painful than other systems, but it does seem to be pain that is easier to schedule (more work during your day, fewer middle of the night emergencies).
Of course, you can't play a lot of games on it...
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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.
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!)
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.
Well, I'll admit to liking VMS. It has been a few years since I've used it, but there were definately some nice things about it. It was definately designed to be used in large systems with lots of users, unlike Unix. It had features like privileges for just about everything that you can think of - much finer granularity than all or nothing. It had a fairly well developed system of ACLs that could be attached to operating system objects other than files (unlike Unix, not everything is a file in VMS). One of my favorite things to play with was logical name tables (something that doesn't really have a Unix equivalent).
On the other hand, there were some things about it that were rather clunky. Spawning a sub-process took a while. There was no easy equivalent to piping the output of one command into another.
I guess the thing to do is to learn about other options and use the best too for the job. Don't get locked into a single solution for everything.
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