Old-ish articles over at TheHaus, but a good read for the weekend. The VAX Files, Part 1: The Beginning, The VAX Files, Part 2: Getting the Hardware and Software, The VAX Files, Part 3: Installing OpenVMS. OSNews hosted an article about VMS as well, a few years ago.
The VAX Files: Learn More About OpenVMS
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I used VMS for maybe 5yrs in the early eighties, can’t remember a damn thing about VMS cmd line, except ned. We had 50 odd users on 3 of the 780s & we were grinding the things down with simulations & graphic layouts of chips. Sometimes during the day, mouse clicks would take 30mins to act on the 512.512 hi rez monitors, so I worked at night instead. We needed 1000x more power & it eventually arrived 10yrs later. In those days, we didn’t get much done compared with todays workstations but I think we had lots of fun.
As for the Vax architecture, classic example of how not to design a fast cpu, I think I still got the arch ref manuals somewhere.
I am kinda of glad that I started off with these olden DEC machines, part of the journey of computing. Nowadays, all most folks sees is bland beige boxes that pretend to be faster than they really are.
next time I will tell of my adventures with King Arthur!!
If any of the good OsNews readers would like to experiment with OpenVMS on a VAX and an Alpha system, you can get a free account at Death Row OpenVMS Cluster:
http://deathrow.vistech.net/
It is possible to get a ssh account on a wms system at the adresse http://vmsbox.cjb.net
once you know the help command, with it you can do everything.
Plus digital used to ship clear documenattion on both the hardware and the software. Digital was bought by a pc manufacturer and all that quality diseapeared ….
—
http://islande.hirlimann.net
I just graduated from college, and one of the first things I did for my new job was to play around with the old VAX VMS system they have at work. It was sort of fun.
This is in the government, and they actually still run these machines to go important work. Hey, they do the job, the main problem now is getting parts for the machines.
VAX and FORTRAN (and it stupid space senstive programming requirement)
Oh the good ol’ VAX. My first experience with the internet was on my local university’s VAX account when I was in high school. Good ol’ pine, lynx, gopher, talk, and news. Before the IMs, my sister and I used to use talk to “IM” each other while she was away at college. One nice feature I remember was that you could have different file “versions”, something like readme.txt:1, readme.txt:2, etc… I think I only had a 2meg quota back then. When I first started, I did not even know about the www, only gopher, which i thought was great until I found www. The school retired the VAX a few years back (moved everyone to a hobbit machine, whatever in the hell that is).
It should be noted that WindowsNT is the successor (although not very worthy one) of the VMS operating system. The original Windows NT was a creation of Dave Cutler who was in the process of designing the next generation VMS operating system. Him and his group of engineers were hired by microsoft and transformed the next generation VMS into what we know as Windows NT.
No wonder the damn thing’s a hog.
Not necessarily. If it was the successsor, they should have stuck to the original framework of Bliss + Macro, which was the reason for its stability and security.
As for NT, it is an OS built on a zealot hatred of all things UNIX and UNIX like. 3.1 was crap, 3.51 was crap, 4.0 was REALLY crap, Windows 2000 is still crap and don’t get me started on Windows XP.
Personally, they should have built the OS on Xenix, rather than re-inventing the wheel, then today we would have a native multi-tasking, multi-user operating system with a mature UNIX SVR5 core (20+ years old). In fact, it would be VERY UNIXWare’ish.
VMS is a jewel that Compaq killed. Its a real pity an operating system offering much better security and reliability than Unixes with a reasonable amount of software that can run on cheap hardware could have been a wonderful addition to Compaq’s line up. That’s not even mentioning how good the Alpha was.
Anyway here is a rather funny post from the old Unix hater’s handbook about VMS vs. Unix
http://www.mindspring.com/~blackhart/requium.html
oh kay , the ppl who run this site say BeOS is dead and yet still post comments about something which is even “deader” than the Beloved OS that so many cherish.
Cheers y’all
That VMS vs Unix link was a good read. A rather different take on everything then I ever had – as far as I’m concerned I like the short-hand nature of Unix commands, its much quicker to type rm then delete. But to each their own…I’d still like to play with VMS and perhaps add it to my resume. 🙂
you may not see it many places, but there is still a VMS market. If you work here it’s one of the few places with job security.
Intel fab’s their chips thanks to Alpha and VMS
Not exactly what was being passed around at IBM in the early 90’s. I don’t know the entire story, but what I recall was that Dave was only considered an average developer at DEC and had submitted some of his ideas to them and was rejected. He then tried peddling his OS to other companies and finally microsoft bought it.
HP has not announced an EOL for openVMS. HP definitely understands that many organizations use and continue to deploy openvms for all kinds of applications (including the DOD). Remember when HP bought Compaq they rolled out an OS roadmap? Well, Openvms is defitely on it
So, before you say that Compaq didn’t understand and killed, please check your facts.
I logged into dahmer.vistech.net, and I figured I’d try to get a little program I wrote to compile. I used lynx to download it, used gzip to uncompress it. Now I need to untar it. When I type “tar”, I get this:
DAHMER $ tar
%DCL-W-ACTIMAGE, error activating image SYS$COMMON:[SYSEXE.EXTRA]TAR.EXE
-CLI-E-IMGNAME, image file DAHMER$DKA0:[SYS0.SYSCOMMON.][SYSEXE.EXTRA]TAR.EXE;
-RMS-E-DNF, directory not found
-SYSTEM-W-NOSUCHFILE, no such file
which seems to be a different message than when a command is not found:
DAHMER $ nothing
%DCL-W-IVVERB, unrecognized command verb – check validity and spelling
NOTHING
Can any VMS gurus (or just someone who knows what they’re doing) tell me how to get my file untarred?
I liked VMS In The Day. I liked the plethora of services that came with the system (at least the one we had, who knows whether they were “optional” services or not). We beat the crap out of our itty bitty 11/730. Put 8 users on that thing and watch the smoke pour out. There was much rejoicing when we finally got a 400MB drive for it.
We certainly didn’t really enjoy UNIX when we got our first Suns, but in time I’ve learned to really like UNIX. It would be difficult to go back to DCL, I think. I’m too used to string | ing | piped | commands > together.
I do, however, miss its versioned file system. I would love to have one of those again for development, but I can certainly understand how it would be very confusing for some folks.
HP is porting OpenVMS to Itanic, so it will be the fourth platform which VMS runs on after VAX, MIPS (not released to public) and Alpha.
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/openvms/roadmap/openvms_roadmaps.htm