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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.'"
Just look to Windows. Just as IBM(rot -1) = HAL, VMS(rot 1) = WNT. VMS and Windows NT were both developed by Dave Cutler (who hated UNIX).
The original Windows NT (3.51?) was a pretty good OS. After the first release though it became Microsoftized. I don't know what Cutler's involvement with that was. However, the real beauty of VMS wasn't so much it's architecture (though that had a lot of good points) but the incredible quality of DEC's implementation. Bugs were for the competition.
"Cutler hated Unix" probably sounds like Neanderthal blasphemy to most Slahsdotters, but there were plenty of reasons to hate Unix in the 80's. The big split (AT&T vs. BSD style), numerous other incompatibilities (later overcome to a large extent by GNU utilities), horribly inefficient, bad security even for (largely) pre-Internet days, and practically non-existent documentation. Take it from an old fart who was there - any Unix of the last 15-20 years is definitely not your father's Unix.