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An Interview With Mark Gorham Of OpenVMS

Posted by timothy on from the installable-personality dept.

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."

3 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Re:New VMS users? by VAXcat · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  2. Re:New VMS users? by ReverendLoki · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I spent a few years as an admin on a VMS system. Sure, you had your occasional headache due to some of the OSs oddities, and we ended up writing a lot of code in house for applications that we would have just purchased on any other system, but there were definitely a lot of unique elements that cluster had that I miss. We never had any sort of security breach on that thing, for one. And for the rare instances there was a node crash, the cluster adapted, and the users ever noticed - hell, a few times we wouldn't have either, if it weren't for the logs, due to a clean recovery and automated restart. That system also provided some of the smoothest, most painless rolling reboots.

    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
  3. Wanna try OpenVMS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.