Well, there's always Option B: you could run VMS on your camera if the camera had virtual addressing capabilities, and VMS could be hacked such that it would run in virtual space. Rendering both of these "ifs" matters of fact would be a Kodak Moment of vast proportions for the person who achieved this goal!;-}
VMS and UNIX are still alive and kicking. VMS would be in a much stronger position had Ken Olsen ceded command of DEC before he was ousted. DEC itself might still exist had Ken stepped aside several years earlier than he was exiled.
Thanks, Karl... looks like it'll be a while before anyone will will have a digital camera upon which a dollar sign prompt appears on the LCD screen. SETPRIV is not yet a viable option on a digital camera!
Being a dinosaur isn't necessarily a bad thing. Case in point: the IBM mainframe. IBM launched the System/360 just over 40 years ago, and Big Blue's still making big bucks selling enhanced and renamed variants of THAT dinosaur.
There was a Jurassic Era in which T-Rex was the biggest and baddest. All that remains of T-Rex V1.0 is fossils and a few skeletons in the world's best museums of science.
There was a Jurassic Park, which was a work of fiction by Michael Chricton (and not one of his best, either). All sorts of dinosaurs roamed that fictional evolutionary leap forward into the past.
The theatrical verion was worse than the book, and you're more likely to see black helicopters hovering over your house than you are to have a close emcounter of the worst kind with a rabid velicoraptor, or whatever those things were called.
In the IT industry, dinosaurs can evolve. The mainframe did, as did VMS amd UNIX. They aren't new, but they sure are improved and have adapted quite nicely. They are neither obsolete nor extinct. The Commodore VIC-20, which materialized in the 1980s--well after mainframes and VMS and UNIX showed up--is both obsolete and extinct. And nobody's booting any OS on a Convex or PRIME box any more.
So being a VMSasaurus Version 8.2 isn't a bad thing to be;-}
When I managed a VAX 11/750 running VMS Version 3 point something in 1982, VMS fit quite nicely on an RM-80. Its capacity was 105MB, IIRC. But the footprint of the OS has grown a bit in the past 2 decades.
What OS does your daughter's laptop run? If it's Windows XP, that excuse for an OS won't fit on a memory stick. It's gobbling up gigabytes on the laptop's hard drive.
The exact footprint of VMS V8.2 is unknown to me, but I know for certain that in 1985, loading MicroVMS on a MicroVAX I involved feeding 44 RX-NoWayShouldIBeDoingThis 5 1/4 floppy disks into the box. I also know that more often than not, Floppy Number 43 would induce a read error, necessitating a return to Floppy Number One. This ceased to be fun after about the third iteration.
Conspicuous in its absence from the Top Ten List is the VMS customer base. They have kept VMS alive. The OS has never been promoted or advertised in the media, customers have done all the advertising.
DEC tried to kill VMS with the Risky Windows NT Affinity Scheme, VMS customers weren't drinking that Kool-Aid.
Compaq was clueless about VMS, and simply wished this cash cow would go away. Customers kept the cow in the pasture.
HP did the math and figured that divesting a ~$4B annual revenue stream offering consistently high margins would be downright stupid. HP didn't do much in the way of trying to attract new customers outside of a handful of "key target markets," but new customers from new markets were attracted to VMS by word-of-mouth. The words came from the mouths of existing VMS customers.
DEC projected an erosion of the existing VMS customer base. What DEC neglected to factor in was the fact that the inevitable emigration was offset by an unexpectedly high immigration rate. The immigration was spurred by endorsements of existing customers.
Tom Sawyer conned other people into painting his fence and paying for the right to do so. VMS customers served as a free advertising channel and thwarted Corporate Policy by ensuring that that VMS fence wasn't torn down.
Customer loyalty is what has kept VMS alive and returned the "dead" OS to growth mode.
As for Kevin Mitnick, he was far better at theft than OS hacking. He gained access to VMS via "social engineering," not direct hackery. He conned a secretary into divulging a password that granted him access to a privileged account. Once he got into the account, he obtained instant system management authority (the VMS equivalent of a UNIX sysadmin with root access). He then chose to download the entire VMS code base, for reasons best known to himself. Digital was not happy about the fact that some joker ripped off high value intellectual property. IMHO Mitnick should not be testifying before Congress; he should be testifying at yet another annual parole hearing.
There are areas where a Beowulf cluster blows a VMScluster right out of the water. HPTC comes to mind. Contrast the price/performance of a 96-node cluster of 64-processor Alpha/VMS boxes lashed together with a Quadrics interconnect with that of a 512-node cluster of 2-processor Linux econoboxes linked with Myrinet or a similar low-cost interconnect. Beowulf wins hands-down. VMS ceased to be a viable HPTC option ages ago. At one time, VMScluster was the way to go, but that was well before LINPACK numbers approached the GFLOP threshold. When CERN dumped VMSclustering as the route to HPTC success, VMS and HPTC started to separate. They are now mutually exclusive.
On the other hand, when national security is at stake, stability, disaster tolerance, and platform security are more important that GLOPS and bargain-basement prices. That's the province of VMS. You don't bet your business--or nation--on an aggregation of commodity boxes running an OS whose security is uncertain.
Unless, of course, you've got the same level of strategic sense (a level somewhere between lunatic and suicidal) as the US Navy's Chief of Idiotic Operations, who decided that a Windows-based command and control and combat information system was the solution of choice for the final Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. CVN78 won't be christened and launched for another four or five years, but it'll be sunk within five minutes of entering its first and last combat situation.
The system implementation language for VMS was BLISS. The MACRO-32 assembly language was based thereon. The VAX hardware architecture and the VMS OS were co-developed and joined at the hip. As VMS evolved, portions of the OS were rewritten in C. When Alpha came along, the microcode that tied VAX to VMS was obsolete... VMS knew nothing of the Alpha architecture. Hence a hardware abstraction layer was used as a go-between. That was PALcode, or Privileged Architecture Library code. PALcode enabled VMS developers to rewrite MACRO routines in C. Not exactly the easiest of architectural ports, and it consumed the resources of the majority of the VMS Development team. Alpha to Itanium wasn't an easy port, but it was accomplished by about 25 developers over the course of 43 months. Far fewer lines of code had to be changed, and there was no code freeze... VAX/VMS V5.4 was the code freeze point for Alpha/VMS; while the Alpha porting team turned VAX/VMS V5.4 into the first Alpha/VMS release, the VAX/VMS developers kept on developing VAX/VMS. So VAX/VMS had more functionality (absent the 64-bit support) than did the initial Alpha/VMS release. It took a number of releases to bring Alpha/VMS up to feature 'n function level of VAX/VMS.
Haven't a clue if VMS was designed with clustering in mind right from the get-go, but VMS started shipping in ~1988, VAXcluster software materialized around 1983-84. Clustering definitely preceded VMS V5.0, the 5.0 release was all about a modular kernel and SMP support and security enhancements.
Dave Cutler did not write or design VMS, he was responsible for VAXeln, a run-time version of VMS. He then went on to develop MICA, the OS intended to run on the PRISM hardware architecture. PRISM was killed because the hardware existed, MICA was nowhere near ready for prime time, or even initial boot time.
MICA was designed to be a superset of VMS that reduced VMS limitations and expanded its capabilities. Cutler went to Microsoft the day after the PRISM project was cancelled, and he took the MICA code along with him. Cutler went on to develop NT, and DEC discovered that portions of NT were identical to portions of MICA, right down to the comment lines.
I'm not a lawyer, but I know enough about intellectual property to realize that NT contained a lot of DEC IP which DEC did not legally convey to Microsoft. DEC's IP lawyers knew that DEC had been ripped off. DEC knew that filing a theft of intellectual property lawsuit against Microsoft would be an exercise in futility, as DEC had far fewer lawyers and far fewer financial resources than did Microsoft.
The end result: the so-called "Alliance for Enterprise Computing." Big win for Microsoft, massive blunder on DEC's part. DEC's CTO, whose initials were BS, jumped at the first offer Microsoft put on the table. Bill Strecker knew a lot about computer technology and packaging, but he didn't have much in the way of negotiating skills. He jumped at an offer that sealed the fate of Alpha back in ~1994 or so.
Under the terms of the "deal," Microsoft agreed to endow Alpha with Intel parity on the server side, but not on the desktop. VMS minus desktop productivity tools (trivial things like the MS-Office suite) couldn't compete in the high-volume Wintel space. DEC unilaterally ceded a vast addressable market for Alpha and VMS. FX!32 binary code translation and emulation couldn't undo the damage DEC did to itself.
Things may change now that VMS is available on an architecture (Itanium) which has a chance of achieving critical mass. Time will tell...
True, assuming your camera had enough storage capacity to support the OS. I seriously doubt that you could cram VMS onto the largest currently available memory stick or flash card.;-}
OK, a few facts for the record. I wrote the the Q's that Mark Gorham provided the A's to in the interview posted on my Web site. So I'm the perpetrator of what has turned into a Fine Mess.
I know plenty about SEVMS and its B2 security level rating as well as the circa-1992 VIP (VMS Integrated POSIX). I left this information out of the article because many of its intended readers don't know C2 from B2, and that VIP didn't cut it as a UNIX development environment. Better to keep things simple, the interview was long enough as it was. I didn't have the time to go down so many ratholes that an article became a book. (Been there, done that, didn't want to do it again yesterday.)
If VMS is a dinosaur, what's UNIX? It's an OS created 10 years prior to VMS, making it a Older Dinosaur. Neither of these dinosaurs are extinct, both have evolved. VMS can do things today that I had no clue it would be able to do today. Same goes for UNIX.
I don't know Mark Gorham's position or job title in the VAX and Alpha days, but he's currently the VP of HP's OpenVMS Division.
Slashdot Mirror
But does it work with FIREFOX?
Well, there's always Option B: you could run VMS on your camera if the camera had virtual addressing capabilities, and VMS could be hacked such that it would run in virtual space. Rendering both of these "ifs" matters of fact would be a Kodak Moment of vast proportions for the person who achieved this goal! ;-}
VMS and UNIX are still alive and kicking. VMS would be in a much stronger position had Ken Olsen ceded command of DEC before he was ousted. DEC itself might still exist had Ken stepped aside several years earlier than he was exiled.
terry s
There was a Jurassic Era in which T-Rex was the biggest and baddest. All that remains of T-Rex V1.0 is fossils and a few skeletons in the world's best museums of science.
There was a Jurassic Park, which was a work of fiction by Michael Chricton (and not one of his best, either). All sorts of dinosaurs roamed that fictional evolutionary leap forward into the past. The theatrical verion was worse than the book, and you're more likely to see black helicopters hovering over your house than you are to have a close emcounter of the worst kind with a rabid velicoraptor, or whatever those things were called.
In the IT industry, dinosaurs can evolve. The mainframe did, as did VMS amd UNIX. They aren't new, but they sure are improved and have adapted quite nicely. They are neither obsolete nor extinct. The Commodore VIC-20, which materialized in the 1980s--well after mainframes and VMS and UNIX showed up--is both obsolete and extinct. And nobody's booting any OS on a Convex or PRIME box any more.
So being a VMSasaurus Version 8.2 isn't a bad thing to be ;-}
What OS does your daughter's laptop run? If it's Windows XP, that excuse for an OS won't fit on a memory stick. It's gobbling up gigabytes on the laptop's hard drive.
The exact footprint of VMS V8.2 is unknown to me, but I know for certain that in 1985, loading MicroVMS on a MicroVAX I involved feeding 44 RX-NoWayShouldIBeDoingThis 5 1/4 floppy disks into the box. I also know that more often than not, Floppy Number 43 would induce a read error, necessitating a return to Floppy Number One. This ceased to be fun after about the third iteration.
DEC tried to kill VMS with the Risky Windows NT Affinity Scheme, VMS customers weren't drinking that Kool-Aid.
Compaq was clueless about VMS, and simply wished this cash cow would go away. Customers kept the cow in the pasture.
HP did the math and figured that divesting a ~$4B annual revenue stream offering consistently high margins would be downright stupid. HP didn't do much in the way of trying to attract new customers outside of a handful of "key target markets," but new customers from new markets were attracted to VMS by word-of-mouth. The words came from the mouths of existing VMS customers.
DEC projected an erosion of the existing VMS customer base. What DEC neglected to factor in was the fact that the inevitable emigration was offset by an unexpectedly high immigration rate. The immigration was spurred by endorsements of existing customers.
Tom Sawyer conned other people into painting his fence and paying for the right to do so. VMS customers served as a free advertising channel and thwarted Corporate Policy by ensuring that that VMS fence wasn't torn down.
Customer loyalty is what has kept VMS alive and returned the "dead" OS to growth mode.
As for Kevin Mitnick, he was far better at theft than OS hacking. He gained access to VMS via "social engineering," not direct hackery. He conned a secretary into divulging a password that granted him access to a privileged account. Once he got into the account, he obtained instant system management authority (the VMS equivalent of a UNIX sysadmin with root access). He then chose to download the entire VMS code base, for reasons best known to himself. Digital was not happy about the fact that some joker ripped off high value intellectual property. IMHO Mitnick should not be testifying before Congress; he should be testifying at yet another annual parole hearing.
On the other hand, when national security is at stake, stability, disaster tolerance, and platform security are more important that GLOPS and bargain-basement prices. That's the province of VMS. You don't bet your business--or nation--on an aggregation of commodity boxes running an OS whose security is uncertain.
Unless, of course, you've got the same level of strategic sense (a level somewhere between lunatic and suicidal) as the US Navy's Chief of Idiotic Operations, who decided that a Windows-based command and control and combat information system was the solution of choice for the final Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. CVN78 won't be christened and launched for another four or five years, but it'll be sunk within five minutes of entering its first and last combat situation.
Haven't a clue if VMS was designed with clustering in mind right from the get-go, but VMS started shipping in ~1988, VAXcluster software materialized around 1983-84. Clustering definitely preceded VMS V5.0, the 5.0 release was all about a modular kernel and SMP support and security enhancements.
Dave Cutler did not write or design VMS, he was responsible for VAXeln, a run-time version of VMS. He then went on to develop MICA, the OS intended to run on the PRISM hardware architecture. PRISM was killed because the hardware existed, MICA was nowhere near ready for prime time, or even initial boot time.
MICA was designed to be a superset of VMS that reduced VMS limitations and expanded its capabilities. Cutler went to Microsoft the day after the PRISM project was cancelled, and he took the MICA code along with him. Cutler went on to develop NT, and DEC discovered that portions of NT were identical to portions of MICA, right down to the comment lines.
I'm not a lawyer, but I know enough about intellectual property to realize that NT contained a lot of DEC IP which DEC did not legally convey to Microsoft. DEC's IP lawyers knew that DEC had been ripped off. DEC knew that filing a theft of intellectual property lawsuit against Microsoft would be an exercise in futility, as DEC had far fewer lawyers and far fewer financial resources than did Microsoft.
The end result: the so-called "Alliance for Enterprise Computing." Big win for Microsoft, massive blunder on DEC's part. DEC's CTO, whose initials were BS, jumped at the first offer Microsoft put on the table. Bill Strecker knew a lot about computer technology and packaging, but he didn't have much in the way of negotiating skills. He jumped at an offer that sealed the fate of Alpha back in ~1994 or so.
Under the terms of the "deal," Microsoft agreed to endow Alpha with Intel parity on the server side, but not on the desktop. VMS minus desktop productivity tools (trivial things like the MS-Office suite) couldn't compete in the high-volume Wintel space. DEC unilaterally ceded a vast addressable market for Alpha and VMS. FX!32 binary code translation and emulation couldn't undo the damage DEC did to itself.
Things may change now that VMS is available on an architecture (Itanium) which has a chance of achieving critical mass. Time will tell...
True, assuming your camera had enough storage capacity to support the OS. I seriously doubt that you could cram VMS onto the largest currently available memory stick or flash card. ;-}
I know plenty about SEVMS and its B2 security level rating as well as the circa-1992 VIP (VMS Integrated POSIX). I left this information out of the article because many of its intended readers don't know C2 from B2, and that VIP didn't cut it as a UNIX development environment. Better to keep things simple, the interview was long enough as it was. I didn't have the time to go down so many ratholes that an article became a book. (Been there, done that, didn't want to do it again yesterday.)
If VMS is a dinosaur, what's UNIX? It's an OS created 10 years prior to VMS, making it a Older Dinosaur. Neither of these dinosaurs are extinct, both have evolved. VMS can do things today that I had no clue it would be able to do today. Same goes for UNIX.
I don't know Mark Gorham's position or job title in the VAX and Alpha days, but he's currently the VP of HP's OpenVMS Division.
Cheers,
Terry Shannon