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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.'"
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
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.