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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.
"...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!
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
Reliability, scalability, uptime, high performance wide area clustering, no viruses, very few security problems of any kind (and those occur mostly in code migrated from unixland). A few of the reasons people choose VMS for an operating system. Individual VMS systems often have multi year uptimes (even in heavily used environments). VMS clusters have uptimes even longer still. And that's leaving out any of the religious flavored arguments about what OS is easier to administer and use.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
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...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
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.
un-ALTERED reproduction and dissimination of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED
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
Haven't a clue if VMS was designed with clustering in mind right from the get-go, but VMS started shipping in ~1988, VAXcluster software materialized around 1983-84. Clustering definitely preceded VMS V5.0, the 5.0 release was all about a modular kernel and SMP support and security enhancements.
Dave Cutler did not write or design VMS, he was responsible for VAXeln, a run-time version of VMS. He then went on to develop MICA, the OS intended to run on the PRISM hardware architecture. PRISM was killed because the hardware existed, MICA was nowhere near ready for prime time, or even initial boot time.
MICA was designed to be a superset of VMS that reduced VMS limitations and expanded its capabilities. Cutler went to Microsoft the day after the PRISM project was cancelled, and he took the MICA code along with him. Cutler went on to develop NT, and DEC discovered that portions of NT were identical to portions of MICA, right down to the comment lines.
I'm not a lawyer, but I know enough about intellectual property to realize that NT contained a lot of DEC IP which DEC did not legally convey to Microsoft. DEC's IP lawyers knew that DEC had been ripped off. DEC knew that filing a theft of intellectual property lawsuit against Microsoft would be an exercise in futility, as DEC had far fewer lawyers and far fewer financial resources than did Microsoft.
The end result: the so-called "Alliance for Enterprise Computing." Big win for Microsoft, massive blunder on DEC's part. DEC's CTO, whose initials were BS, jumped at the first offer Microsoft put on the table. Bill Strecker knew a lot about computer technology and packaging, but he didn't have much in the way of negotiating skills. He jumped at an offer that sealed the fate of Alpha back in ~1994 or so.
Under the terms of the "deal," Microsoft agreed to endow Alpha with Intel parity on the server side, but not on the desktop. VMS minus desktop productivity tools (trivial things like the MS-Office suite) couldn't compete in the high-volume Wintel space. DEC unilaterally ceded a vast addressable market for Alpha and VMS. FX!32 binary code translation and emulation couldn't undo the damage DEC did to itself.
Things may change now that VMS is available on an architecture (Itanium) which has a chance of achieving critical mass. Time will tell...
IT Consultant and Publisher, Shannon Knows HPC