91–100 of 108 posts
For those interested in DEC history, HP have put the text of their Digital Technical Journal articles online at http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/past.htm (no figures, alas). Volume 4 issue 4 introduced the Alpha architecture and includes an article describing the effort to port OpenVMS: http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol4num4/vol4num4art7.pd...
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We use it at our company (financial software). One of the reasons being that the code is older than Linux and VMS was a good bet at the time. We have almost entirely moved away from it and onto Linux but considering the decades of code and systems built on and around it, it is truly a monumental task to move off VMS while keeping a system used by very high paying clients running smoothly.
If your employer is who I think it is - you still have many years to go. :-)
For those interested in DEC history, HP have put the text of their Digital Technical Journal articles online at http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/past.htm (no figures, alas). Volume 4 issue 4 introduced the Alpha architecture and includes an article describing the effort to port OpenVMS: http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol4num4/vol4num4art7.pd...
I worked on OpenVMS at the start of my career. I heard that the customer didn't want to port away from OpenVMS and this prevented HP from killing it off. One famous story in VMS folklore was where a building containing a datacenter catches fires and Unix admins run into the building to retrieve the backup disks and OpenVms admin do not since clustering give hot backup by default. Another story was of banks having dat…
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> (The other three compilers have their own individual pathways to the new architecture.) Is one of them for VAX or is binary support for that architecture being dropped?
Based on some of the prior documents, I believe they are: MACRO-32 (The compiler for VAX assembly), C++, Ada MACRO-32 works at a lower level than the other languages, and needs to generate assembly directly instead of an IR. The C++ compiler is being replaced by Clang, and the previous VMS releases used Adacore's compilers, so Adacore will need to be convinced to port their compiler to x86 VMS.
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Here's a couple of examples for you: I Sysadmined a VMS box running on a couple of AlphaServers (2100 and 2100A) if I recall. At one point a disgruntled employee had taken a 22 rifle into the server room and shot several rounds at the equipment, only 1 bullet hit, but it went through a RAM bank, the system disabled the faulty hardware and continued running. The other cool part was the interchangeable boards - the sys…
Ever work with Sun servers? Yeah, you could swap out cards, CPU, ram, drive, power, without halting or rebooting the OS. But not just Sun servers. This is not a feature unique to Alphaservers/VMS.
The Alphas had a motherboard and daughterboard - and the daughterboard was a generalized bus, so a single slot could have a RAM or CPU slot in it --- were Sun servers capable of this too? Or was a RAM slot a RAM slot and a CPU slot a CPU slot and they were not interchangeable?
I'm curious because I've never seen any other machines with a generalized CPU/RAM bus, I'm curious if Sun hardware supported this? If it did, can you remember the model numbers so I can read up on it?
Needless to say I was beyond excited to see Digital's booth with actual Vaxen. They were mystical, super powerful systems we could only dream of one day touching at college. One of the floor walkers was demonstrating VMS and let me login and play around.
At school we had learned all sorts of commands by a mix of monkey command line silliness (we discovered SUBMIT when someone literally typed SUBMIT TO MY WILL at the prompt) and reading the hallowed documentation which were normally locked away in the IT director's office. You had to be especially good (straight A student) or a toady to get access to the docs.
Anyway we learned RSTS/E would let you claim resources with the allocate command. You could ALLOC a printer or disk but at NCC Digital had networked their systems to demonstrate global VAX clusters and VMS supported the same command across the network! You could ALLOC HOST::DEVICE and it would work.
Out of curiosity I ALLOC'd an entire VMS node (ALLOC RED::). It crashed. Unable to believe it when they got the server up I tried it again and it crashed again. I slunk away nervously sweating the rest of the day, convinced somehow that the Digital police were going to descend on me and kick me out of the conference. I went back the next day and confessed and told them what I had done to crash the VAX, figuring they would no longer be angry and that they should know what happened.
Unrelated to crashing the VAX I ended up getting a job offer from a Digital client to write Pascal code for MRI machines connected to VAXen strictly from one of those right place right time conversations. Those were the days. (Sadly as a 10th grader with no car I had to turn down the job.)
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Ever work with Sun servers? Yeah, you could swap out cards, CPU, ram, drive, power, without halting or rebooting the OS. But not just Sun servers. This is not a feature unique to Alphaservers/VMS.
Nope! I didn't know that. Very interesting. The Alphas had a motherboard and daughterboard - and the daughterboard was a generalized bus, so a single slot could have a RAM or CPU slot in it --- were Sun servers capable of this too? Or was a RAM slot a RAM slot and a CPU slot a CPU slot and they were not interchangeable? I'm curious because I've never seen any other machines with a generalized CPU/RAM bus, I'm curious…
Who, and why?
One nice feature of VMS that I haven't seen mentioned here yet is the built in versioning of files. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Files-11