21–30 of 58 posts
I have a bad habit where instead of doing something relevant I play with old stuff I read about but didn't have access to as a kid. VMS always interested me since I first read about it in the jargon file. I recently found an alphaserver on craigslist and I just requested an openvms hobbyist license so I could play with it. An octane running irix is another expression of this problem.
$ show developer /user=steve_jones /source=linkedin /url=https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevejonesinwashington
edit: corrected url
He also likes to talk about the binary compatibility on VMS; e.g., VAX binaries that run unchanged on Itanium. Unfortunately, that commitment to compatibility has wavered a bit since HP offshored VMS maintenance. We've had to work around some breaking changes recently.
If I'm understanding these slides correctly, AMD64 VMS would require recompiling VAX, Alpha, and Itanium applications from source. I kind of see a chicken-and-egg problem: application vendors won't port without demand, and customers won't adopt without applications.
I have a bad habit where instead of doing something relevant I play with old stuff I read about but didn't have access to as a kid. VMS always interested me since I first read about it in the jargon file. I recently found an alphaserver on craigslist and I just requested an openvms hobbyist license so I could play with it. An octane running irix is another expression of this problem.
Nothing wrong with that, you simply suffer from retrocomputing. Careful about the power bill though. Large SGI stuff (e.g. Onyx) can go in the kilowatt range under load, and an AlphaServer idles at around 200W last time I checked. IT was no green back then :)
I blew at least three fuses between that and the RX5670 (4 x Itanium), which consumed a similar amount of power @ 110V.
I work with an old DEC guy who co-wrote a book about the BLISS compiler back in the day. He thought it made a much better "portable assembly language" than C. He also likes to talk about the binary compatibility on VMS; e.g., VAX binaries that run unchanged on Itanium. Unfortunately, that commitment to compatibility has wavered a bit since HP offshored VMS maintenance. We've had to work around some breaking changes r…
The VEST technology could possibly be used to convert native VAX binaries to run on X86_64, I don't know for sure how the endian-ness would be dealt with.
ugh. i switched from vms to unix in '88 because the telnet in vms was crappy. other than the wonderful help system, I never found VMS attractive.
VMScluster still blows away anything else. 20 years ago it was doing what you can only now do with vMotion now... And being able to set a working set per job... And a coherent story for cross-language libraries... I could go on. VMS was a technological tour de force that has yet to be rivalled.
I have a bad habit where instead of doing something relevant I play with old stuff I read about but didn't have access to as a kid. VMS always interested me since I first read about it in the jargon file. I recently found an alphaserver on craigslist and I just requested an openvms hobbyist license so I could play with it. An octane running irix is another expression of this problem.
Nothing wrong with that, you simply suffer from retrocomputing. Careful about the power bill though. Large SGI stuff (e.g. Onyx) can go in the kilowatt range under load, and an AlphaServer idles at around 200W last time I checked. IT was no green back then :)
I love the way you phrase that! (I do suffer from that condition, too, in a way, if "suffer" is the word I want - but in my case it is select pieces of obsolete equipment sitting on my bookshelf. My favorite is an ancient IBM ISDN adapter (it still says 1TR6 instead of EDSS1 somewhere on the case) that once hooked up a mainframe to the outside world... ;-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing wrong with that, you simply suffer from retrocomputing. Careful about the power bill though. Large SGI stuff (e.g. Onyx) can go in the kilowatt range under load, and an AlphaServer idles at around 200W last time I checked. IT was no green back then :)
My ES40 (4 x 667MHz 21264s) consumes 16A @ 110V. Most 110V US circuits are 10A. I blew at least three fuses between that and the RX5670 (4 x Itanium), which consumed a similar amount of power @ 110V.