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HP Discontinue OpenVMS
simpz writes "The register is reporting that 'the ancient but trustworthy server operating system' OpenVMS has been discontinued. From the article: 'HP never really promoted its acquisition and OpenVMS suffered from a lack of development compared to HP-UX, itself suffering from competition from Linux. It was only a matter of time, but it's a sad end. Many of its old-time fans, your correspondent included, cherished a hope HP would move it to x86-64 – but since development moved to India in 2009, OpenVMS has been living on borrowed time. Now, it's run out.'"
There might be a few insights in that old code worth preserving...
Be who you are...and be it in style!
Of fsck. India ?
noooooo
Should be !!
Windows 8
Last time I heard VMS had never been hacked. Is that still the case?
It was the best OS I ever worked with. It'd be nice if they open sourced it.
HP needs to release it under an open source license since they're discontinuing it.
Is it just me or has it become tradition for HP to kill things lately? It really makes me wonder what they plan on actually selling...
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Its always the same when a huge software project moves out of the EU or US to india its bound to die. India has some great engineers but 90% of those graduating have just memorized stuff and passed an exam which has a pass rate as long as you have 33/100. Obviously this creates a lot of worthless engineers.
From personal experience: One our customers the ESA (European Space Agency) had some servers and storage arrays running on SUN hardware. We just managed the hardware and operating systems. The software/middleware was all responsibility of the customer who had outsourced this part of the job to Tech-Mahindra (and india based outsourcing giant). These guys would mail us asking us how to change their password and how to "copy" a file from the server while having ssh access (and this happend every few days). If you have such guys working on such important systems I don't even want to know whats happening on development level. Its true that in every team you have a few top-scorers but not knowing how to change your password on a unix system and "managing" that system day to day tells me there is something seriously wrong.
I'm not surprised that it took HP so long to figure out
SYS$SYSTEM:SHUTDOWN.COM
on the whole O/S.
After all, it has a dollar sign in it and they're not particularly astute with cash lately.
More sad news caused by our top and business leaders such as Fiorina, Ellison and other hapless piece of crap that were born on 3rd base hit a triple. All they know how to do is buy up good things from other mismanaged companies and run them into the ground. the biggest threat to US national security and tech preeminence is the ivy league MBA.
I sense a really insignificant disturbance in the force as if a few voices suddenly cried out in terror and then went back to stroking their beards.
Get your requests in for the hobbyist licenses and for any emulators you want to run. Grab the patches and licenses while they are available.
A pity HP was so indifferent to VMS. Its user base was as loyal as any I've seen, often foreswearing all suitors. The VMS documentation is enviable to anyone accustomed to Unix. I could appreciate much of its magnificence even if I didn't have the heart to love it.
Now comes the decent into the long dark.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
There were few operating systems that handled loose-clustered networking as elegantly as VMS. Want to centralize user credentials? Easy, just place SYSUAF.DAT on a shared volume. And since the files could have structure, you could lock individual user records for editing rather than the whole file.
Another great feature was the concept of "quorum". Quorum, as in the organizational term of the number of people present at a meeting necessary for it to be an official meeting of an organization, was the number of reachable hosts necessary to conduct business. Say you had a redundant banking site - and the link between them would go down. If they are a redundant configuration, they would continue to process transactions - with their database quickly diverging. Using quorum nodes, you could set up three hosts on three sites - two major server setups and a simple workstation somewhere central - and voila, no single point of failure.
Besides, there is a magnificent book, "OpenVMS Internals and Data Structures", which so elegantly and wonderfully describes operating system design.
I really, really hope that OpenVMS could be open-sourced and this codebase might serve as the base for a community-written x86 port.
toresbe
Goodbye, vomit-making system!
The point was genuinely a good one at that time. There were a lot of facilities in VMS that made some really elegant transaction processing, for instance, available with even a relatively few lines of code. Besides - keep in mind, Unix was seriously fragmented at the time. BSD/SysV and a ton of varieties of those. All immature and inefficient. Unix in the days of VAX and PDP-11 is nothing like Unix in the last two decades.
toresbe
I first used VMS in Computing 122, programming in Fortran 77, at uni in 1984. Vale VMS...
Forget it old timer, you and I can discuss it after the shuffle board game if I can fix my walker. Kids today think that *nix is The One True Way. They don't remember when men were men and real computers ran VMS. None of this "can't get any" geek crap either. Beautiful women would throw themselves at VMS programmers and admins until you finally had to say enough, enough!
HP has become the place where many tech eventually gets put to sleep forever. I wonder which one will be next?
Beautiful women would throw themselves at VMS programmers and admins until you finally had to say enough, enough!
Never happened to us RSX11M guys.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
VMS was an awful operating system. Sure, it was better than RMS, RSX, etc but that isn't saying much.
Good riddance. VMS's demise is proof that the market actually does work very well.
This is what happens when you hire Carly Fiorina.
Just don't do it.
Take 5 seconds to look at her track record.
She will neuter your company's ability to adapt and innovate and respond to the market by repeating the age-old mantra of "just screw the customer more".
She will poison your company from within so they continue to flail and flop about years after she's left.
She's absolutely not worth the "diversity" PR bonus point.
For the record, I'm 25. Got into VMS about a decade ago, when I found a VAXstation 3100 in a dumpster. But I'm not entirely representative in general. :)
toresbe
eat shit.
When the amount of development your OS gets suffers "compared to HP-UX" you are in astonishingly deep trouble. I have had three run-ins with HP-UX, first in 1998, next in 2004, and finally in 2010 (when my current job retired all it's existing HP servers and moved to Solaris). When I encountered HP-UX the first time, in 1998, it seemed to be at least 10 years behind the times. Very little had changed in 2004, which meant that it was falling farther and farther behind each year. In 2010 it seemed little better than it had been in 2004, and I guess that management agreed, since we finally cut the cord and moved on to something that was, at least by comparison, more up to date.
I also used OpenVMS in the early 2000s, and it was capable, but idiosyncratic (record structured files were a PITA, and the file versioning was no replacement for proper version control. I really liked logical names, however, and the global symbol table was useful). It had a head start on lots of other OS's with respect to clustering features (cluster wide file system, message queues, and distributed lock management was all built-in), but much of the userland was GNU stuff ported over on the POSIX layer. DEC seemed to have given up on the whole "innovation" thing and was just milking existing big contracts.
just a ghost in the machine.
That's how they always kill it: they outsource to the perceived cheaper labor, which lets them claim that the product got discriminated against by the market, when the market is reacting to the fact that the project got farmed out, thus is unlikely to have frequent updates, thus is a dead-end project because users won't get the support they need or a competitive product. RIP
Futurist Traditionalism
YAAAY!!!! OpenVMS was horrid! Glad it's gone.
Our UNIX invironment, however, still goes strong to this day..
About 5 years ago, an HP instructor told us that the US Military wanted VMS to never be sunset.
I wonder what changed.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
It only killed my wife. Despite this, it still was better than Windows NT.
I consider myself to be very fortunate to have had the opportunity to experience such a wonderful operating system. I'm probably very young compared to most VMS system managers, my first experience of VMS was about 7 years ago. My first impressions were that it seemed quite antiquated (mostly due to the lack of a modern shell) but as I began to learn more, it became a breath of fresh air compared to anything I had ever used. I began to discover features, flexibility and power that make other modern operating systems seem primitive. I can only hope that it will now be open sourced as it would a great shame to loose such a unique operating system that offers so much that others don't.
Over 21 is old - get used to it. I'm 29 I think (my memory isn't what it used to be - is Reagan still president?). Still I admit that I'll probably be by the shuffle board court before you - but not by much!
when the US was first becoming industrialized by copying the english, im sure we had our own share of problems. watt, joule, ampere - which of these was american? none.
Neither James Watt or André-Marie Ampère were English...
One of my favorite features of VMS was file versions. Each file had a version number. As many of you probably remember, each file had a version number. So you could have:
NEEDBEER.TXT;1
NEEDBEER.TXT;2
NEEDBEER.TXT;3
That feature combine with some logical commands, such as PURGE/KEEP=2, would keep the two most recent versions of the file. I wish there was such a command in OS X instead of having to delete all older versions manually.
This is a sad day, and I miss and will miss VMS.
There was a reason why it was originally called VAX/VMS -- the operating system and the Vax architecture were developed simultaneously; the hardware supported KESU (Kernel, Executive, Supervisor, User, for those of you who are non-aligned), the x86 chip didn't. I think this is the root of the security problem that WNT suffered when VMS was ported to Microsoft's product. Each mode allowed a subset of the total instruction set, with certain instructions (such as writing to device drivers, for example) denied to outer modes. For this reason, Microsoft hackers could write code where they shouldn't. For this reason, VMS hackers couldn't.
And yes, WNT was just VMS with a UI and a slightly updated memory model. Many unique memory-oriented SYSGEN parameters were duplicated in WNT.
Also, VMS was very much an operating system consisting of handling interrupts; Unix wasn't this way back then (being a more general-architecture OS, in Unix stuff was polled a lot).
I will miss DCL and all those lexical functions I could (and frequently did) recite in my sleep.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I briefly worked on an OpenVMS system ~15 years ago, with a young, new hire. If I recall, to save a certain file, you'd type in the file name, then press the "DO" key, followed by the "WRITE" key. I told him to name it "Dudley". When I explained why, he looked at me like I was crazy.
Okay, you take a break there now, you're embarrassing the rest of us.
And lay off the brownies in the lunchroom.
UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines.
For hire.
All the crap comments on HP-UX, geez. It's a great friggin OS. I've run lot's of HP-UX servers for years and there isn't a god damn thing I can't do.
64-bit multicore CPU's in 1996. Nuff said.
I hear some anti Indian engineer rants sometimes from Indians in the US. It's not racist, it's basically pointing out the flaws in the educational system or the attitudes of the outsourcing companies themselves.
that's the bones of a project that died in 2010, nothing useful there
I would meet you on your terms, but I can't find out how to "kindly do the needful".
Here's a hint. If you claim to use English, please use it. A request starts with one of a few words, of which kindly is not in that set. Needful is an adjective, which means it needs (the irony) a noun to modify. Do is a non-conjugated verb. No, my friend, you do not speak English, but you do a good approximation, with a distinctive Indian flair.
And while we owe a debt of honor to India for the decimal point, or more importantly, the concept of zero as a placeholder, exactly what major mathematical breakthroughs is India pursuing? How is India stunning the modern day mathematical world? You might as well just get in line with Persia for "awesome mathematical advances, which are now yesterday's 800 (or more) year old news.
VMS VERSION 4.1: (An official DEC memo)
Please stop submitting SPR's. This is our system. We designed it,
we build it, and we use it more than you do. If there are some
features you think might be missing, if the system isn't as
effective as you think it could be, TOUGH. Give it back, we don't
need you. See figure 1.
(slashdot whitespace filter won't allow the ASCII art middle finger graphic that should be here)
Figure 1.
Forget about your silly problems, let's take a look at some of the
features of the VMS operating system.
1) Options. We've got lots of them. So many in fact, that you need
two strong people to carry the documentation around. So many
that it will be a cold day in hell before half of them are used.
So many that you are probably not going to do your work right
anyway. However, the number of options isn't all that important,
because we picked some interesting values for the options and
called them...
2) Defaults. We put a lot of thought into our defaults. We like
them. If we didn't, we would have made something else be the
default. So keep your cotten-picking hands off our defaults.
Don't touch. Consider them mandatory. "Mandatory defaults" has
a nice ring to it. Change them and your system crashes, tough.
See figure 1.
3) Language Processors. They work just fine. They take in source,
and often produce object files as a reward for your efforts. You
don't like the code? Too bad! You can even try to call
operating system services from them. For any that you can't, use
the assembler like we do. We spoke to the language processor
developers about this, they think a lot like we do. They said
"See figure 1.".
4) Debuggers. We've got debuggers, one we support and one we use.
You shouldn't make mistakes anyway, it is a waste of time. We
don't want to hear anything about debuggers, we're not
interested. See figure 1.
5) Error logging. Ignore it. Why give yourself an ulcer? You don't
want to give us the machine to get the problem fixed and we probably
can't do it anyway. Oh, and if something breaks between 17:00 and
18:00 or 9:30 and 10:30 or 11:30 and 13:30 or 14:30 and 15:30 don't
waste your time calling us, we're out. See figure 1.
6) Command Language. We designed it ourselves, it's perfect. We
like it so much we put our name on it, DCL - Digital's Command
Language. In fact we're so happy with it, we designed it once
for each of our operating systems. We even try to keep it the
same from release to release, sometimes we blow it though. See
figure 1.
7) Real Time Performance. We got it. Who else could have done such
a good job? So the system seems sluggish with all those priority
18 processes, no problem, just make them priority one. Anyway,
realtime isn't important anymore like it used to be. We changed
our groups name to get rid of the word realtime, we told all our
realtime users to see figure 1 a long time ago.
In conclusion, stuff your SPR. Love VMS or leave it, but DON'T complain.
--
R.I.P. Malcolm
I learned to code, by being exposed to a lot of VAXen: 11/730s, 11/750s, 11/780s, microVAXen and some VAXStations...had access to pretty much all compilers and was able to learn Fortran, Cobol (argh!), VaxC, Macro32 and was beginning to learn BLISS when the job was nomore...then, I switched to WinNT and never had direct access to VMS anymore. Still have 'fond' memories of WATCH.EXE, from a DECUS tape; it literally took me out of the 'matrix'. So long, old pal, $ LOGOUT
Link to HP OpenVMS Roadmap (PDF)
HP OpenVMS Roadmap
the concept of zero as a placeholder
Originated with the Mayans.
Neither James Watt or André-Marie Ampère were English.
Ok James Watt was born in 1736 in Greenock, Scotland which like it or not is physically joined to England however for the sake of political correctness we will call him Scottish.
André-Marie Ampère was born in France so we will call him "French".
You forgot "James Prescott Joule" who was born in Lancashire, England so we have to call him "English".
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
While it may have been stable and had good features, the long winded and convoluted command structure made it awful to use.
Scotland which like it or not is physically joined to England however for the sake of political correctness we will call him Scottish. Following that "logic" Voltaire was German, since France is physically (well, geographically) joined to Germany. Or if you meant politically joined, then I guess that makes Ghandi English since India was politically joined to Great Britain when he was born.
"point out flaws" seems to be a new way of saying "i made this shit up" while maintaining a false sense of propriety.
Yawn.. really? Criticizing others for not knowing multiple languages? Where I live in the people I meet day to day can't even get English right, forget learning another foreign language...
To be pedantic, Watt's nationality was British. Scotland wasn't a sovereign state then (and still is not today). There is no such nationality as Scottish or English, only British. A bit like Texan isn't a nationality.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Just moved from Compaq Alpha box to CHARON VAX virtual server for our old MRP system about 2 months ago. I don't have to use it much, other people program on it a lot more than me. I just runs, runs correctly, and rarely fails.
Something like 15 years on Slashdot, and finally a story of mine makes the front page. Woo. :Â)
Liam P. ~ "Intelligence is a lethal mutation." (me)
Once the people you've been working with get enough experience they are pulled off the shitty cheap outsourcing gigs and you have to deal with another newbie.
US CEOs look at it as cheap labour, Indian companies see it as free training.
It's all because people who partied their way through what should have been their education and got a job via family connections think they can outfox sharp Indian businessmen.
That's what's happened with some software I use from a huge US company that's been trying to get their flagship software package rewritten in India since 2003 - so far the GUI is sort of done but a bit buggy, and it's just a front end to stuff that's stuck in 2003. Meanwhile I'm shifting a lot of stuff away from that to software from a small company in Texas that's probably made up of their laid off programmers.
More than physically. Every thirty years on average. In fact, the latest one is somewhat overdue.
Then again, with the current state of the French economy and that clown Hollande in charge, it's probably not worth the effort of starting up the panzers.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They[1]'re called Arabic numerals because Europeans copied them from the Arabs, who get them from the Indians.
You reckon any of those groups of people visited Mexico in the middle ages?
[1] the sort with a zero, i.e. not Roman.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Real computers run MVS.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I was a teenager when I started playing with VMS and Unix. Unix seemed easier and less verbose. VMS was a good OS but I felt like I was writing a sentence every time I needed to execute a command. Even Unix is pretty much done for. Yea we have Solaris resurrection, thanks to Ellison, FreeBSD and varients but it is now a Linux world.
There's no way to way to get tparse() to take a CLI command without hitting return in VMS 4.0. You could use an interrupt, but preceding characters would be discarded if you did. So it'd have to be two keys, or some number of keys terminated by return, to be a believable tale.
I don't see any thing in the release notes. Shenanigans!
My first networked operating system, my introduction to computing, and the Internet (BITNET before that). *sigh*
DCL> SET DEF [SAD]
Or rather for the people involved and the people who contributed code and invested their lifetime into then "stranded" projects. On the other hand, properly, wisely and long term maintained "programs/projects" .. what a joy, especially the open source / similarly licensed ones. Tools that have a very fruitful and useful history to look upon.
...oops
I would meet you on your terms, but I can't find out how to "kindly do the needful".
Well, let him 'revert back to you'
The isolation of the Mayans doesn't preclude their invention of zero as a placeholder.
You know, you can still get an account on and give OpenVMS a try (for free of course). Check out http://deathrow.vistech.net
Itanium is currently in its 3rd generation, and having adapted the other CPU practices of multiple cores, is a lot more promising in terms of preserving compatibility than the original VLIW architecture allowed. Of course, the problem is that it's now a CPU looking for an application that justifies its existence. There is just one I can think of - supercomputers - and even there, organizations tend to use either RISC CPUs, GPUs or x64 CPUs.
Once HP killed PA-RISC, HP/UX was more or less over - a major effort would have gone in just porting HP/UX and its apps from PA-RISC to Itanium. From what I've read, Itanium did a better job emulating PA-RISC than it did x64, which is why all the x64 OSs gave it such a lukewarm reception, and gave up on it before too long. Since that time, Linux has advanced a lot, the BSDs have advanced a lot, but the Unixes that were based on SVR4.x/5 have stagnated - first SCO, then HP/UX and then Sun.
With the Itanium 3, HP ought to focus on improving the SMP capabilities of HP/UX, or bringing in SMP specific Unixes to the platform - such as DragonFly BSD, or some such OS. B'cos multiprocessing is going to be the only way in which I see the Itanium do performance improvements, assuming that it evolves further at all.
That book was too good. It described in detail everything that was wrong w/ Unix - and delved into a bit of C/C++ as well