HP has announced the end of TRU64 (among other things) by saying: “HP and Compaq both offered UNIX operating systems: HP-UX and Compaq Tru64 UNIX. Decision: HP-UX will be the long-term UNIX for the new HP. Tru64 UNIX has some very advanced features — including clustering and file systems — and some of those will be integrated into HP-UX over time. Rationale: HP-UX has a much larger market share and installed base of customers. It also has much broader ISV support than Tru64 UNIX. HP also will deliver on the previously announced Compaq OpenVMS roadmap, including the port to Itanium.“
HP/Compaq Merge Results in Tru64’s End
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For anyone that is interested, (and I would be curious to know if there are many), here is the openvms roadmap listed out. VMS roadmap link:
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/openvms/roadmap/openvms_roadmaps.htm
Please read before you post. HTML is not allowed anymore. I edited your post, but this is the last time I do it. All you have to do for a working link, is to have spaces around it.
I worked a little with VMS a long time ago and I really liked it (robust and clean and better than Unix, IMO) but it seems to be really obscure now. There are still some modern apps like a cell-phone billing system package that is popular with wireless providers, for example, that are being developed for VMS, but I have no clue how widely deployed it is now. I guess only the highly specialized ‘insiders’ who use VMS a lot really know what is going on in that world these days.
Compaq swallows DEC and now Compaq gets devoured in turn by HP. You know what they say…what comes around, goes around. Eventually all of the USA will be one big company.
They must have meant customers NOT using Tru64, HP Jornada, or the others products that are being dropped. I guess it also will not benefit all the employees getting canned. So the company will be bigger but the choices will be less. I still don’t see how we benefit.
🙂
Its called wimNT,2000,XP.
MS hired/stole erm borrowed the people that created VMS and had them create NT.
So NT,2000,XP is just an sort of stable MS version of VMS.
NT has none of the features of VMS. If that were so, then NT
could cluster the *RIGHT* way, and it certainly can’t! NT does have some connectivity ablities with VMS, that is what those DEC VMS engineers were brought into MS for. VMS is used by many companies. It’s a very stable and scalable operating environment. The only other product that comes close to it’s clustering capabilities is Tru64 with it’s TruCluster technology. VMS is used a lot for databases(Oracle), and for production purposes (Intel uses it to manufacture their chips). Tru64 is not dead, it’ll be around for atleast 5 more years before being consumed completely by HiPUX. Both VMS and Tru64 are used by lots of governments, labs, production environments, power companies(tru64 powers 85% of the computers used to control power plants around the world), and HPTC applications. Compaq/DEC has lots of contacts to support VMS and Tru64 for the next 10-20 years, so both will be around for a while.. unless HP wants to deal with people like the Defense Department comming after them for breach of contract.
NT is VMS, but it is adjusted to suit the Win32 api. that’s why all the early NTs were so portable. NT 3.5.1 could run on 4-5 cpus(I don’t remember). NT 4.0 ran on x86 and Alpha and Win2k can run on Alpha too (I think).
Oh but NT/XP/2000 is VMS.
Take a gander at this article.
http://www.winnetmag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=4494
WinNT and OpenVMS deal with things in quite similar ways, when you look under the hood at the kernel and HAL subsystems. This is to be expected, given that the creators of NT came straight out of the DEC camp. However, there are a couple of big differences that should be noted:
– NT 3.51 and earlier look a lot more like VMS than NT 4.0/2K/XP do — VMS has things like TCP/IP and graphics (used to be called DECWindows — but it’s close to being a port of X11) above the kernel, much as NT 3.51 did. To “increase performance” MS over time moved graphics (GDI, in this case) and TCP/IP into kernel-space, which deviates considerably from VMS
– Even in light of the above point, WinNT was designed with concepts like networking and GUI built-in from the beginning, while most “features” on VMS consisted of what were called “layered-products” that were installed on top of the OS. This included 3rd-party TCP/IP stacks (and other networking protocols, such as DECNet) and other things we take for granted. Interestingly enough, for a while DEC’s branded TCP/IP stack was actually a re-brand of someone else’s stack — Attachmate’s. (I think they finally switched to an in-house developed one at around OpenVMS 4.x) Clustering, however, has always been VMS’s holy-grail. It is done at such a low-level inside of VMS — which is why, incidentally, VMS’s clustering is so good — that it actually resulted in a completely new OS under-the-hood from previous versions. VMS clustering even has it’s own network protocol, LAT.
Overall, I’d say that WinNT is much to VMS the way that Linux is to *classical* UNIX — it’s a new implementation of the same/similar way of doing things. For example, both view disks as devices, environment variables in NT look very similar to VMS whatever-theyre-called (aliases?….help!) as you can use them as devices as well as data holders, and DCE syntax looks eerily similar to that of DOS/CMS in WinNT.
– Ken
(P.S. — This is not meant to start any piddly VMS/UNIX/Windows/Whatever flame-wars, but feel free to correct any inaccuracies, this is all from memory 🙂
Darn, so much for TruHP-UX
Tru64 is truly the Unix of the gods….
Sigh. And in its place they give us HP-UX. What a travesty.