huh...???
Posted on 01/10/2006 10:17:04 AM PST by SirLinksalot
Digital’s venerable VMS just keeps going and going and going....
01/09/2006
By Keith Parent and Beth Bumbarger
MASS HIGH TECH : JOURNAL OF NEW ENGLAND TECHNOLOGY
New Englanders old enough to have worked in the region’s computer industry in the halcyon days of the mid-to-late 1980s participated in one of the great entrepreneurial periods of our nation’s history. Those were the days of the Massachusetts Miracle, when technology titans such as Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), Wang Laboratories, Data General and Prime Computer Inc. employed tens of thousands of high-tech professionals in what then Gov. Michael Dukakis described in a famous understatement as “good jobs at good wages.”
The “Big Four” as they were known, disappeared in the late 1990s. In the space of two years, Wang went bankrupt and was acquired by Getronics. Prime became Computervision Corp., which later was bought by Parametric Technology Corp. Data General was sold to EMC Corp., and Digital disappeared into Compaq Computer Corp., which shortly thereafter merged into Hewlett-Packard Co.
Thousands of minicomputer alumni in the region still work here, and we share some bittersweet memories of those years when New England ruled the roost. It is hard for today’s New England high-tech workers to comprehend the scale of those companies. Yet a funny thing happened on their way to extinction. Their products lived on. The hardware and software they developed in the 1970s and 1980s is still being used by customers worldwide.
Take Digital’s Virtual Memory System (VMS) operating system. VMS was released in 1977 to support the VAX 11/780, the first commercially available 32-bit computer in the world. The VAX/VMS system was wildly popular, and by 1982 Digital was second only to IBM Corp. in computer sales.
In 1992, Digital introduced the Alpha 64-bit computer and renamed its operating system Open/VMS. Its clustering capability — which allows users to link many VAXes into a virtual mainframe — is still considered state-of-the-art. Stories abound about the systems reliability; the most famous, perhaps, being how the Irish National Railroad ran its system for 17 years without a single reboot. Try to accomplish that on today’s systems.
VAX, Alpha and Open/VMS are particularly prized in the financial, health care and telecommunications industries, where high availability is critical. No wonder more than 400,000 VAX and Alpha systems are used by 10 million people daily. All good things come to an end. While Open/VMS will probably survive for decades, the VAX and Alpha architectures will gradually be phased out by Hewlett-Packard, which wants customers to migrate to its newer Integrity servers. As HP removes its support for these products, the ecosystem of Digital spin-offs, most with fewer than 100 employees, will step to the fore and keep these venerable systems running. Whether it’s memory boards, storage controllers, or the most sophisticated software consulting services, New England really is the digital center of excellence.
New technology life cycles tend to be measured in months, not years. That may be true of consumer goods such as cell phones. But there are so many examples of robust, mission-critical systems in use today that are still supporting the financial, transportation, health care, telecommunications and energy infrastructure. We would not be the least bit surprised if Digital’s systems outlive the people who created them.
Keith Parent is CEO of Court Square Data Group, an IT consulting firm in Springfield. Beth Bumbarger is CEO of Nemonix Engineering of Northborough, which provides VAX and AlphaServer upgrades, service and support.
bump
I started out on the Control Data 6000 series and spent 16 years writing assembly language code on nearly all of their mainframes and super computers. Replaced several IBM and VAX systems with Cybers. I also wrote microcode on some of CDCs exotic computers as well. My division of CDC was bought by General Dynamics.
and that's in the 10+ years that we were primarily VAX in the data center.
If you have an old VAX or Alpha--or buy one on EBay--you can get a VMS hobbyist license for free. If I were looking for another time sink, that's what I'd do.
Of course it's not, it's over at AMD with 1GHz coherent hypertransport. :-)
True but you can't run a real OS on AMD, That would rock if HP would port VMS to AMD
IBM PC Support/Client Access tossed in with Netware and an IP stack.
You could make it work...but good luck running anything resembling an application afterwards.
*shudder*
our 11785 got struck by lightening(!) and burned out seven of eight back plane boards. the eighth blew a few weeks later. a few swaps later, we were back in business.
I used to mess with it on weekends when few were about. had tons of fun with it. managed to create command files for each class of users, removing commands and/or switches we didnt' want those users to have. nobody figured out how we did it.
VMS was fun!
My school bought one of the few DECSystem 20's when I was graduating. I developed code on a PDP 11/70 running
Xenix. We went with VAXs a couple of years later, but everybody aliased the VAX commands to the less cumbersome Unix set.
December 17, 1983; installed and configured my (then) company's foray into RS2732. Hooked up the phone line and swapped files with another PDP in Salt Lake City.
I was hooked! I've been surfing the internet since 1983.
A real O/S? I suppose that's true if you're not counting all the various 64-bit flavors of xNIX. 64-bit VMS native on an eight-way Opteron machine would be a religious experience, IMO.
The NT project was headed by one of the main VMS engineers, whom Microsoft had lured from Digital. Unfortunately, and we are paying the price to this day, it seemed to have been a rushed project, as it missed some of the key advantages of VMS like the multi-version file system, batching facility, DCL shell, and so on.
Multi-version file system in 1978? Try that on EUNUCHS in 2005! You can pay a fortune for something called ClearCase, which has a specific purpose (code version control) and still misses some of the features of RMS. Some years ago, before I knew anything about ClearCase or similare systems I wrote a code version control program using DCL, several thousand lines of it, logical names, ACLs and other things. It was primitive but it did the job.
Get 'em to send you to the porting bootcamp- whatever that's called. 2 grand, they give you pointers on porting your application, and you get to take the Itanium box home.
LOL_~!
I hope you've gotten a new computer since then...........At least a '286.............
Provably false.
Cutler left DEC before version 4 and clustering came out.
The VMS of today is orders of magnitude greater in terms of capability than it was in those days.
but as far as the VAX itself was concerned, I was sure it would run underwater and shot with a .45 slug.
we replaced them years ago with alpha4100's that were very reliable, but not quite as "unstoppable" as I found the VAX family. now, they are gone, too, and alas, my data center is jam packed with blue Dell servers . . . .
to do the work of 2 alphas :)
And pessimest, I hate to contradict you BUT:
New applications ARE being ported to VMS on Itanium.
huh...???
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