OSNews

Formerly, the monetary cost of licensing a VMS system was prohibitive for the hobbyist, often exceeding the price paid for the used hardware. In 1995, Pat Jankowiak, a hardware hacker from Dallas Texas, appeared before a panel of Digital's Vice Presidents at the DECUS national event in Anaheim California, and askedfor a hobbyist license for VMS, citing the tremendous opportunity missed on the pdp-11. The request was driven by the need for a superior computing system capable of handling large numerical values, and the desire to build a free public access VMS-based BBS system. In 1996, Digital granted permission for DECUS to issue licenses for noncommercial users of OpenVMS on the VAX, and the program is known as the "OpenVMS Hobbyist Licensing Program".

Uses

OpenVMS systems are being used for many purposes. A DECUS Local user group in Dallas uses one as a bbs, serving mail and news to nearly 400 members (telnet dfwlug.decus.org). The system is always up. The datacenter at Montagar Software Concepts has several machines running OpenVMS on which the enterprise is based, as does the Baylor Hospital, the Veterans Administration, and various entities requiring security and/or system availability where lives may depend upon the system. In the not too distant past, Credit Lyonnaise, a French bank, burned to the ground. They were open the next day in a temporary location, every piece of data intact, no transactions lost, because they were running OpenVMS and had a mirror site 40 Km away. The University of Texas at Dallas uses OpenVMS version 5.5 on an 11/750 which controls an electron beam lithography machine, the mission-critical cornerstone of the nanotechnology fabrication clean room. Even though the machine is over 10 years old, it still runs 24/365, and is shutdown only for system upgrades or modifications.

What's so great about VMS?

Virtual Memory

In the 32-bit VAX running VMS, the virtual memory is mapped to a 4 gigabyte address range. What this gets the programmer is the ability to run very large programs on a machine with modest physical memory. Disk space is used for a dynamic swapfile, and therefore as far as programs or users are concerned, the machine looks much bigger than it is. VAX VMS does 128-bit floating point math too.

Shells and Windows

OpenVMS is really easy to use and set up, and its many DOS-like commands are familiar yet optionally more verbose and very powerful. VMS uses a command line interpreter known as Digital Command Language, or DCL, and for those who prefer Unix commands, a POSIX shell is available. DCL is the means by which users communicate with the OS. Simple or very complex programs can be written in DCL. Symbols, logical names, and extremely powerful lexical functions are available at the DCL prompt.

You can run programs and perform all system functions from a character-cell based terminal, or through a configurable GUI encompassing as many virtual terminals and other applications as you need.

If VMS is run on a workstation such as a VAXStation 3100, the user can run DECWindows, an X-windowing system which provides an extremely useful GUI to point and click at. A user can do anything within such a context that may be done in any common UNIX environment, and more.

Rock Solid Security

VMS is extremely resistant to intruders, including even ubercrackers like Mr. Kevin Mitnick, as he himself has publicly stated. VMS laughs at the SATAN program. The password file and other sensitive files, unlike those in various flavors of "X" and Microsoft operating systems, is inaccessible to common users by default. Direct access to physical memory or I/O requires special privileges not normally given to users. While it's true that one can make a UNIX or NT box fairly secure by careful and proper setup, VMS comes that way right out of the box.

Stability

Absolute reliability is another VMS strength. If a program fails, the worst thing that usually will happen is that the user's login session may hang or terminate. The system keeps right on going. This is the beauty of the virtuality of VMS. You don't crash the real box, just your own login. On the other hand, a careless system manager could give various "dangerous" privileges to those who are irresponsible, and a poorly written program can be a weak link, but those are problems outside the scope of an operating system, and no amount of OS toughness can compensate for poor management.

Applications Base

There are literally thousands of commercial applications available for VMS, from system tools, programming tools, CAD/CAM packages, mail, news, cluster software allowing several machines to share resources, networking, Oracle and several other databases, editors, word processors, bbs's, scientific applications for simulation, the list goes on.. And for every commercial application, there is often at least one if not several freeware apps available through DECUS and in various places on the web, not to mention the games.

Windows NT

A testimony to the righteousness of OpenVMS is that many of the multitasking and security features inside the highly touted Windows NT are based on VMS internals concepts. Of course, security and robustness also has to do with the architecture of the computer as well, so therein lie some of the various troubles with NT-Intel, and reasons why it will likely never be as good as VMS for really available and secure computing.

1. "Part I"
2. "Part II"