Posted on 04/07/2010 1:22:51 AM PDT by Yosemitest
“A user clicks Ok and their system is mine.”
And when you’re dealing with users that is not a hard step.
Designed in the 60s and implemented in the 70s. Ya know before the internet, browsers, java, flash, or just about anything modern.
There were factions in VMS that wanted to port it to x86 as long ago as 1995, maybe even earlier. Was that part of Dave’s vision? I don’t know.
I was involved with the port of VMS to ia64 (itanium).
With ia64 probably going away, the rumor is that VMS will be ported to x86. About 15 years too late.
Of course, there are technological obstacles to overcome; compilers, linkers, and loaders being the first. Then there is the port of applications using the new compilers and linkers.
It’s a huge effort. So I don’t know if it will actually happen.
Yes, it helps. Thank you very much. :)
BSD brought it into the internet age soon enough. Because of UNIX’s device abstraction system, it wasn’t hard, and daemon and user accounts looked alike. Graphics borrowed from MIT’s W system (as UNIX borrowed from MIT’s Multics), which was advanced to X.
As a past VMS user (20 years ago on large VAXen) I agree it would be a cool blast from the past to see it working on Windows/Linux hardware.
Maybe the first port could be a virtual one under Linux.
> Maybe the first port could be a virtual one under Linux.
Once VMS is ported to x86, if that should happen, then you could run it as a virtual guest or on the bare metal x86 platform.
But it needs to be ported to x86 first.
I’m not sure that VMS can be developed under Linux, because of the GPL (GNU General Public License). I did my modelling and development using MicroSoft Visual Studio.
:)
ping
Hopefully that does not mean that VMS requires Microsoft-licensed elements in it.
I do Tier 3 tech support. We're always talking about PEBKACs (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair).
Assuming there is no Microsoft content in VMS itself, the use of Microsoft Visual Studio wouldn’t be limited by the GPL but by its own license if, like later Windows component licenses, it states that it can only be run on Windows. Linux has Wine if it is desired to run a more or less Windows compatible environment under it. Whether used on Windows or Linux, the Studio would also have the issue of the cost of its licenses (though maybe old versions in the back of some dusty warehouse could be had for a song).
> Hopefully that does not mean that VMS requires Microsoft-
> licensed elements in it.
Not at all. My work was simply modelled using Visual Studio. Perfectly legitimate use according to the more clearly worded Visual Studio license. There is nothing Windows in VMS, except of course for the VMS that was ported to Windows by Dave Cutler and Co.
I am a Mac user, but don't really "hate" windows machines. It just seems that the ones I've bought for the family are just not as "easy" to manipulate for simple things. Nobody here is a "computer" savant and my kids get all kinds of cr@p by getting "free games" online. Now stopped. By joining Facebook groups...now stopped and other stupid cr#p.
My only use for the computer is my current business, emergency medicine. Works very well for me but isn't perfect. I still have to use Firefox instead of Safari for certain banking/test certification sites. But it works easily and I must admit I don't have any type of anti-viral protection. I back up my computer hard drive on an external drive weekly and can do it every night if I felt like scheduling it automatically.
I was just sick of messing with drivers, compatibility errors, error messages and after my last hard drive crashed about 3 years ago switched back to Macs. It's been the best thing I've ever done. Stuff is more expensive but the hours wasted messing with my machine easily paid for the Apple surcharge.
As far as Apple being a liberal company.... so is GE, but I still use their light bulbs, CT scanners, MRI machines, lab equipment...etc. But I respect anyone who boycotts them on principle. I will never buy another Suburban (4 previous) because of our affirmative action presidential takeover of that company.
There are so many complications with Linux running windows apps. There is even the Linux ndiswrapper used to run windows drivers under Linux, a very questionable practice.
It is much more legitimate to buy devices that have native Linux drivers, or to develop a Linux driver for the device.
As for running windows apps in Linux, it’s best to install Windows as a virtual guest with a valid Microsoft license.
By the way, this is one of the safest ways to run Windows. You have complete control over the network and the built-in iptables firewall.
Ndiswrapper is used for hardware drivers in Linux, for example wifi dongles that don’t have a native Linux driver yet. How that could possibly come into play with Visual Studio (especially older ones that probably play very well with Wine because they use more primitive calls)... can you explain? The broader idea would be to switch over to an all Linux development environment as soon as that became possible.
All pretty standard PC security stuff. I wonder if Microsoft Security Essentials handles this?
We would need to start with a working Bliss-64 (or Bliss-32) compiler.
No small feat, that. And then there’s the consideration of extended instruction sets too.
The one small consolation prize is that the VAX was like the x86 currently is - little endian.
As much as I’d like to see the results, when I think of the effort involved... my tendency is to get a beer, sit down and drink it quietly until the thought goes away...
Where did I say ndiswrapper had anything to do with Visual Studio?
All I said is that I did some modelling of development code using the extremely user-friendly environment of the Visual Studio IDE.
When somebody provides as nice an IDE for Linux, I’ll consider using it for modelling.
Meanwhile, for development in the Linux environment, printk() is my friend.
> We would need to start with a working Bliss-64 (or Bliss-32) compiler.
We would need both.
Good news is that the GEM back end can emit x86 code.
Bad news is nobody has visited that code in a long while, and most of the people who know how it works are no longer with the company.
Not exactly.
Cutler wanted to re-write VMS in C to make it more portable to target new architectures quicker. Cutler hated Unix, but loved the idea of a better OS implementation language than Bliss, and he wanted to re-host VMS on some of the hot new RISC chips that were coming of age in Unix workstations in the early 90’s. It is difficult to tell younger people what the prevailing notions of systems programming were in the 70’s - and that IBM and DEC (and others) had their own home-rolled systems programming languages for their OS projects. DEC had Bliss-11, Bliss-32, Common Bliss, etc, just as IBM had PL/S, etc.
DEC, never missing an opportunity to shoot themselves in the feet where workstations and PC’s were concerned, sufficiently pissed off Cutler that he left. Part of the reason this happened was that DEC was a Massachusetts company. If you weren’t at “The Mill,” you simply were not politically connected. Cutler was at DECwest in Seattle, and just not “in the loop.” So he just wasn’t able to market his idea to the increasingly sales/marketing managed DEC in the early 90’s and left the reservation.
That said, while the IO architecture of WinNT shows VMS parentage, the security aspects of VMS were almost all left behind. VMS had real security. Windows has very little of any of VMS’ security architecture, and the results show this.
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