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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!
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.
Indeed, what will their customer use now?
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.
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.
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
And they certainly knew their history:
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/year-2000/leap.html :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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
Had being the important tense. I work as a computer sub contractor. I have been in a LOT of branches of banks, power utilities, big box stores, restaurants, telephone exchanges, defence sites, that sort of thing. The only place I have seen a VMS machine this decade is a certain video store chain who's parent company went bankrupt (and stopped supporting/upgrading their IT) last decade.
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
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.
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.
You should have mounted a scratch wife.
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
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