Revitalizing the Internet and VMS 267
Da Beave writes "Similar to the
"Going Back to the Past of the Internet" /. post,
these guys want
to not only revitalize the Internet, but the
OpenVMS Operating
System (Started by Digital, then to Compaq, now to HP....).
They have a cluster of VAXen (32 bit) and Alphas (64 bit) for public
(non-commercial) usage.... With more compilers than you can
shake a stick at, and it's considered one of the most secure
OS's around....." VMS was one of the first operating systems I learned to use. This page really brings back some memories, both good and bad.
VMS? (Score:2)
Re:VMS? (Score:3, Funny)
on spelling... (Score:2)
I could never get over the command completion in VMS... get the first three chars of the command correct, and it would usually run. Sometimes I'd swear I only got the first three letters of my password correct, and it would let me in.
Then there was the campus gripe about the "longest email addresses on the internet": @sitvax.stevens-tech.edu. My gripe is I started too late to get a bang path address...
cool! (Score:1)
Re:cool! (Score:1)
Re:cool! (Score:2)
You can't use it anyway (Score:1)
The DeathRow OpenVMS Cluster operates under the hobbyist program. If you intend to use these reasources for commerical reasons (for example: porting commercial code, or running a company web page), you will be removed. This would violate our hobbyist agreement/license, and we can't afford to let that happen.
So, it's useless as a replacement for anything.
Re:You can't use it anyway (Score:2)
While it was quite easy to port well-written code between OpenVMS and Unix systems, OpenVMS just didn't maintain the market share to survive. The world focused on *nix vs. Windows, with a stable core of corporate mainframes, and a few specialist markets (Apple in media content, SGI in CGI editing.) Much like OS/2, it was a victim of poor marketting that didn't show the computing public what the real benefits of their advanced features were.
While I wouldn't mind seeing OpenVMS on a client site, I really don't expect it will ever happen. Business does not buy orphans, and they're the only market that needs the benefits of OpenVMS features. *nix systems already have add-on packages and projects to address those needs in other ways.
they aren't distributing it (Score:2)
Their software license doesn't allow them to let you use it as a business platform.
Maybe you saw 'OpenVMS' and thought it was Open Source? It's not - it's proprietary, commercial software.
Re:they aren't distributing it (Score:1)
Can't speak for the AC, but I did. Thanks for pointing that out.
Re:they aren't distributing it (Score:2)
VMS Hacked (Score:1)
Re:VMS Hacked (Score:1)
Stupid Contracts (Score:3, Interesting)
Then I got the contract. It had a clause stating that any idea I ever had as well as any ideas I had while I worked for them belonged to them. As well as a non-compete clause. They wouldn't budge on it, so I turned down their offer.
Oh well. I really would have liked a chance to work on their OS, but they weren't interested. Really too bad.
Re:Stupid Contracts (Score:2)
Re:Stupid Contracts (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stupid Contracts (Score:3, Interesting)
It's an interesting social phenomenon in many companies - first and second class employees. The first class ones are the older staff, with older contracts that don't rape them of anything they've ever thought of, have decent redundancy provisions, and so on. The newer employees get the second class contract which make it clear they should consider themselves lucky they aren't ebing used for organ harvesting.
Re:Stupid Contracts (Score:2)
Re:Stupid Contracts (Score:1)
But still.. being a kernel hacker on VMS would have been fun.
I will give it a try atleast (Score:2)
VMS is 1337 (Score:1)
Oops, sorry, it's not 1988 anymore, is it ?
graspee
why bother? (Score:1)
It gave me a prompt, which I assume was like a root or single-user-mode prompt. Too bad I didn't know many VMS directives.
The thing's error message is longer than the DOS one in winshit2k.
I still think the project should go on, but my time will be spend on more pressing matters. UNIX one the OS war by being superior. It didn't do it by blackmailing other companies to include it(M$). It didn't stay alive by forcing it on users of its hardware(Apple, Sun). Linux survived because anyone could get a hold of it. BSD kept up with the best of them, and would still be going strong if Linux didn't have a cooler name.
Re:why bother? (Score:2)
Re:why bother? (Score:2)
"There are no maint. backdoors, single user mode boot hacks, etc. and believe me, a simple ^C is not sufficent. I have two Micro-VAXen and I wound up having to reload VMS from scratch, just for want of a supervisor password. "
This is untrue. In almost all cases one can use set UAFALT (IIRC, else it is some similiar command
Re:VMS is 1337 (Score:2)
Re:VMS is 1337 (Score:1)
Just goes to show how elite I was in 1988!
I did steal some passwords from members of staff who logged on though, and nearly got thrown out of university for it. I was only in my 3rd week as a fresher!
I suppose that's what happens when you meet a multi-user system for the first time when you're used to messing about on ZX-Spectrums- there is a desire to do evil!
graspee
VMS better than *NIX? (Score:1)
Re:VMS better than *NIX? (Score:2)
The problem is that although for many years, Digital didn't give sources, but they gave away source listings. Regrettably they stopped after VMS 4.5. However the system was exceptionally well documented and it was possible to write some neat hacks (for example, I did one to fetch somebody elses command line history buffer). It was far from as open as Linux. However, many old VMS people have fallen in love with Linux because it is so accessible.
Re:VMS better than *NIX? (Score:2)
Re:VMS better than *NIX? (Score:4, Informative)
VMS was an engineered solution, by engineers, for engineers. UNIX is a organic one, slanted towards experimentation and diversity. In Unix you have a plethora of high level tools to accomplish the same things, in VMS you had one very well though out generic one. Usually a high fidelity implementation taken directly from the core of Computer Science theory that was hard to find fault with. For example, queue management. In Unix you have a dozen print tools, batch tools, etc. each with their own unique configuration nightmare. In VMS you had Queue Manager, a single thought out queueing management tool that didn't press "printness", "batchness", "uucp polling", or whatever, into the equasion. Some of these included...
Queue Mangement
Distributed Lock Management
Object Access Control and Rights Management
Record Management Services (File structures) (RMS)
Some question the RMS bit, myself included. Although it was one "well thought out tool" the idea of integrating file structure into the OS simple did not return on the promise. Hey, not everything can be perfect.
At a lower level, VMS had a number of nice features too. For example, every system call that could, possibly, be interrupted had the ability to complete by calling a function by name (AST). Sorta like sigio but far more powerful since each and every call specified its own handler and parameter block. Noise like Apache's "wake once" event wakeup problem simply could NEVER have been become an issue under VMS. The design flaw that lead to the "Apache problem" didn't exist.
VMS had some powerful per process management features, which many UNI* types don't even grok, let alone implement, yet. They were, however, complicated -- but most useful when you knew what you were doing and needed to do it. UNI* tries to "just work", but as the VM types in Linux are learning it isn't always that easy.
Unlike UNI*, VMS has a very powerful scheduler, and it let it's owner call the shots. Unlike UNI*, you had priority and runtime quantum and VMS never confused the two. So, something was priority 0 WOULD NOT run, ever, if something at priority 1 could. Lock your resources if you want, it's was your machine. UNI* takes gargantuan steps to save people from themselves.
Then, the VMS scheduler was IO sensitive. If you genererated a keyboard interrupt, your process was temporarally bosted a few priority points for a quick burst of responsiveness. Again, like every tool in VMS there was ONE scheduler and it offered a single, complete, and unified, end-user experience that deftly handled batch, timeshare, and real-time programming.
Re:VMS better than *NIX? (Score:2)
The oneness applied to RMS as well, whichever language you used, you could always access an RMS file. If you really didn't want RMS, you could just open a file on a block level and DIY, which what many DBMS systems did.
Re:UNIX advantages. (Score:2, Interesting)
On Unix I could easily determine exactly what files existed with a few commands, easily open any file on the system with the same call, and parse a filename into it's parts with 3 lines of C. A program to copy a file was ten lines at most, while due to RMS "pip" on VMS was larger than any other program on the system and an absolute nightmare of bugs and patches.
It was also trivial to run a program in the background, and fork allowed me to experiment with multithreading, something that only the ultimate wizards could try on VMS.
From more advanced programmers I heard the CLU compiler used a method of calling that was as much as six times faster than the calling sequence VMS required and that one of the big problems was cutting down the number of function calls Clu generated to get the speed acceptable because of this.
Unix had "man", a way to look at documentation using the computer (another revelation at that time), and you could really find what you needed. Also all the documentation fit in two 3-ring binders, while VMS had an entire wall of books.
I never heard a single statement by anybody that Unix failed relative to VMS and I was dumbfounded that Dec did not scrap VMS right then and there and switch to this better system.
Now I was in high school, and I did not know much then. Quite likely I missed the advanced areas where VMS was better. But to a novice there was no comparison and no competition, Unix blew VMS away completely and utterly.
Re:UNIX advantages. (Score:2)
Several people have mentioned "help" and I do remember using it. I do not remember what the problem was but "man" did work better at least on the systems I was using. The main advantage of "man" was that you could do "man blah" where blah was the name of a system call and you got information about it, and you could do "man cmd" where cmd was a shell command and you would get percise information about the switches that command took. I don't think this was true about "help" as it was set up. However "man" certainly was useless if you did not know the name of a command or call, I think "help" did much better here, but once you knew something "man" was used much more often. I have never figured out why nobody made a system that did both commands and concepts as keywords, the sets don't intersect. Man pages also had "see also" on the bottom that did not really exist in Help, I really relied on this a lot, and later Unixes where "less" cleared the screen on exit really drove me crazy because it made the "see also" stuff useless. I have to admit "help" is a much better name than "man", I think a lot of the Unix stupid names is due to the fact that they chose the obvious name for a first version of the program, and it was broken but they could not delete it without breaking scripts using it, and K&R and so on are too embarrassed to admit they made these mistakes.
Fork at least allowed me to get two programs running at the same time. I did nothing more than calculate in the background and wait for exit. But this was way more than I ever did on VMS where getting any kind of parallel execution required months of study of complex stuff.
Re:UNIX advantages. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:VMS better than *NIX? (Score:2)
I find it incredible that people will keep saying this crap, the same people that say "Unix is hard because you have to use the CLI". They then bring up this case-sensitivity issue, a feature that is useless except if a CLI is used. The average dummy using Windows would never notice if files were case-sensitive, and in fact would never notice if the file system allowed more than one file to have the same name!
It is also trivial to provide the ability at the program level rather than in the system. While you are at it you can provide spelling correction of file names, filename completion, and lots of other things that are enormously more user friendly than just the fact that 'a' and 'A' can be interchanged.
VMS did not let you put a lot of nice characters like space or multiple periods in the filenames, a far, far worse problem for the user than case sensitivity.
Re:VMS better than *NIX? (Score:2)
Now you are surely saying "but we won't change the case of the german double s". But again there is no guarantee that nobody else does. There are rules, but the rules are complicated and keep changing. Currently the most common rule for Unicode is to ignore any attempts at case matching except for the ISO-8859-1 characters that have matching case. But there are others who say that only the ASCII characters should case-match. And there are others that say that we should obey the complete rules of Unicode. Then there is UTF-8 and the fact that the same Unicode character can be encoded multiple ways. Are these equivalent?
Even in Ascii you will find systems that consider '@' and backquote to be the same character, and '[' and '{' to be the same character, due to simple bit masking algorithims. You even get sorting bugs if systems disagree about whether tolower() or toupper() is done before comparing.
The truth is that this is a terrible problem and it is complete nonsense that a bit of "user friendliness" needs to be buried in a deep part of the OS where it can complicate implementations and produce security errors.
Also there is absolutely no reason for this. People want a friendly GUI that does this for the user (and also does filename completion and spelling correction and version numbers and many other nice things) and case independence in the system is at best irrelevant, and at worst a hinderance to such things (I know as I have written file choosers for both systems and Unix is immensely easier to deal with because of this).
but VMS lives (Score:3, Troll)
And the relationship between VMS and UNIX is analogous to the relationship between Windows NT and Linux. VMS was indeed considered very secure--probably because it had lots of "security features". In real life, however, VMS systems were often a lot less secure than UNIX systems because it was nearly impossible to get all the security setting right. More generally, UNIX was built around a small number of simple ideas and paradigms, while VMS attempted to be the all-singing-all-dancing operating system.
So, if you want to get that "old VMS feeling", just fire up a Windows NT or XP machine and type at the command line--it's roughly the same.
Re:but VMS lives (Score:1)
A computer prof I had pointed out the above fact as well as the letters VMS shifted up one is:
VMS -> WNT (WinNT)
Interesting...Intended...or accidental?
Re:but VMS lives (Score:2)
Linux shifted up:
MJOVY
and down:
KHMTV
GNU up:
HOV
GNU down:
FMT
DEBIAN up:
EFCJBO
DEBIAN down:
CDAHZM
Nothing good.
Nested Threads (Score:2)
NT is named after the NT register in the 386
where NT stands for Nested Threads.
of course marketing spin turned it into
"New Technology"
so we now get "WindowsXP based on NT Technology"
or Windows XP based on New Technology Technology
a bit like PIN Number
Re:Nested Threads (Score:2)
Actually no...
Due to FTC regs, they cannot use the "New"
anymore becuase the underlying OS is not new
anymore. They can still use "NT" as long as
they claim it doesn't have a real meaning
anymore.
Re:but VMS lives (Score:2)
ttyl
Farrell
Re:but VMS lives (Score:2)
Most of the hacks were through social engineering. The others were due to imperfect parameter checking. As the system matured, it got even more tight on the hecks and most of the holes disappeared.
Re:but VMS lives (Score:1)
Yes, his name is Dave Cutler. IIRC he quit working for M$ in discust about the time NT 3.5.1 was released (please correct me here).
So, if you want to get that "old VMS feeling", just fire up a Windows NT or XP machine and type at the command line--it's roughly the same.
No. The Win cmd shell is nothing like VMS. Not even close. It's really a glorified DOS shell, and has nothing whatever to do VMS. Ever used a logical under a Win cmd shell? I thought not.
I was a sysadmin on VMS systems for about 1 1/2 years, and right after that I wrote desktop apps that used RDB on VMS as a data source for about 3 years. I have at least a passing familiarity with it. It is without a doubt the most stable OS I've ever used including SunOS, Solaris, Linux, and WinNT*.
It's really too bad that DEC/Compaq continually bled their VMS/Alpha customers dry. Software, hardware, support were all obscenely expensive, and this more than anything else is what killed VMS and DEC in the long run.
Re:but VMS lives (Score:2)
Re:but VMS lives (Score:2)
DOS command line is more like unix that VMS
Add a letter to VMS... (Score:2)
Microsoft supposedly named it NT because WNT is simply +1ing the letters VMS.
Re:Add a letter to VMS... (Score:2)
MS changed back to a Windows centric focus.
From what I heard, David Cutler left DEC
to work on some ideas he had to go beyond VMS.
Re:Add a letter to VMS... (Score:2)
Re:but VMS lives (Score:2)
Re: but VMS lives (Score:2)
> The same guy who was responsible for VMS is responsible for Windows NT. You can think of NT as an attempt of a next generation VMS
Except that Windows clustering still hasn't caught up to where VMS was 15 years ago.
Re:but VMS lives (Score:3, Informative)
And, no, you can't just fire up CMD and get that "old VMS feeling". Case in point, type help on Windows and compare that to help on VMS. Light years apart buddy!
Re:but VMS lives (Score:2)
Re:but VMS lives (Score:2)
Sorry, but from a UNIX perspective, I just don't see that much difference between NT and VMS: to me, they both embody roughly the same approach to OS design, an approach that I don't like. The fact that between the two, VMS is a much better and more mature OS doesn't change that opinion.
But obviously someone must like something about it, since a lot of people are paying a lot of money for both VMS and NT.
Re:but VMS lives (Score:2)
It's the feel, not the commands, that are similar: non-uniform pathname notation, distinguished command/scripting language, pathname expansion by commands, an plethora of security bits, lots of special cases all over the place.
should have a go at VMS so they could see exactly how different an OS that's NOT UNIX really is.
Indeed. While details differ, VMS has many of the same complexities of other mainframe and minicomputer operating systems of yore. UNIX was explicitly created as a reaction to that style of design. I just don't get why people think systems like VMS were ever a good design.
nice things about VMS (Score:4, Informative)
2) Wonderfull Batch/Print queue system (unix is nowhere close). Easy to use, easy to create/manage queues, full featured.
3) DCL scripting language was pretty good for its type (better then sh)
4) A Command Line Interface that was pretty predicatable in its use, which was great for causual users.
5) Good on-line help that was nested. You didn't have to eyeball pages of "man" output.
6) Uptime reliabiity that Unix has only recently started to approach.
7) MMS was superior to make. CMS was a superior source code library. MMS and CMS were integrated.
8) I'll take EDT or LSE over vi any day!
I haven't admin'd VMS for 7 years but I have fond memories of it.
It makes you wonder... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It makes you wonder... (Score:2)
i find your sig derogatory to homosexuals everywhere
they get far more sex than bill gates.
I thought VMS became WNT (Score:1)
Maybe there could be a UNI course OS101 how to turn a secure OS into a virus infested shatered [decepticons.org] mess. Bill can hand out the degrees
Re:I thought VMS became WNT (Score:2)
VMS++ = WNT (Score:4, Informative)
Re:VMS++ = WNT (Score:2)
(TGV was also a contributing source to one of the original two Internet Toasters - yes they really existed - in 1988. The other Toaster was built by John Romkey [FTP Software] [Both Toasters used my SNMP software in their controllers.])
Re:You're wrong (or, VMS++ != ONT) (Score:2)
Docs, if jumping into the free shell (Score:4, Informative)
This [compaq.com] seems to be the best guide for a user who's never even looked at VMS before.
VMS is dead (Score:2)
Re:VMS is dead (Score:2)
VMS Still in Use at RIT (Score:1)
VMS was my first OS too (Score:2, Flamebait)
At the time I didn't know better, but had a vague idea that it must be possible to make something better. Luckily other VAX users had thought so a long time ago, and ported UNIX to VAX.
Then after 1 year of VMS we got our first UNIX machine (a Convex minisuper) and then I saw the light. In my opinion, UNIX and VMS were two opposites in almost any aspect. Using UNIX was a joy, it was elegant, efficient and interesting.
I have never been able to understand how (later) in a single company two such opposite culters could stay together (in DEC, the UNIX and VMS groups) and it turned out, not surprisingly, they could not.
Everyone who likes UNIX and who knows both UNIX and VMS well cannot but hate VMS. I bet many, like me, still wake at night sometimes due to a nightmare about VMS. In that respect, WNT is a worthy VMS++ indeed.
Re:VMS was my first OS too (Score:1)
Whilst I use and prefer UNIX/Linux, I appreciate that VMS isn't a bad OS at all.
But perhaps it's simply because the first time I did a 'sh log' on an Alpha at work (which we have only recently switched off after 10+ years of use) a smile can across my face as it took me back to the good ol' 'assign' of my beloved Miggy
Re:VMS was my first OS too (Score:2)
Ok, let me first tell you about my personal collection of computers. I have
HP-9000 J-210 - 2 processor HP/UX
RS/6000 J-40 - 8 processor AIX (run *very* hot)
3 x Sun SS-20 - 2 processor Solaris
1 x SunBlade 100 - single procssor Solaris
2 x Sun LX - singal processor Solaris
2 x Tadpole 3GX - laptops, Solaris
Alpha 2100 - single processor Tru64
intel - single processor SuSE 7.1
I've run Linux since the
I use unix everyday in my job. I love unix, if it weren't for unix, I probably wouldn't be working in the computer industry.
My other remaining box is a VAX 7000/90 running OpenVMS.
I love VMS. It can do everything that unix can do, but it just does it differently. You wouldn't program in lisp the same way you would program in C. You have to think in VMS when using VMS and don't try to apply unix ways of working to it.
My guess is that you just didn't learn enough about how VMS works to really understand it. Not surprising since you only used it for a year. Maybe if you'd learnt it more and had to do system admin tasks in it, you'd appreciate it better.
VMS was ahead of unix in so many way - access control list security, VMS had it way before, clustering, VMS had it way before (and it still is bettter than most versions of unix). VMS was set up from the start to monitor and control users and their cpu usage, for unix, you get vendor-created add-ons which do the job and are no way near integrated.
From a captive end-user perspective, maybe VMS was not so much fun, but from an admin perspective, if was fantastic.
Re:VMS was my first OS too (Score:2)
The other 'features' like ACL and other control-freak tings, they were only an annoyance (in fact ACL still is one of the things I generally despise; they encourage an admin to make a quick permission exception, leading to a mess without concept in a short time).
I remember end of the 80s, every physics department was dumping VMS and moving to UNIX (sometimes on new hardware, sometimes on VAX hardware). We all were so relieved to get a nice and elegant environment instead.
For VMS with its lead-heavy process model for example, the "UNIX building box" philosophy is alien. You don't have a shell starting small subprocesses all the time, possibly combining them using pipes. The 'everything is a file' concept doesn't exist, so you have different system calls for handling each kind of device (i.e. multitudes of system calls compared to the small and orthagonal well though out set of UNIX system calls). In short, it is just like WNT
Re:VMS was my first OS too (Score:2)
I'm not quite sure what you mean by that but HP now have two Unix groups (HP-UX and Tru64) and a VMS one.
I work for a large software company that sells software on many platforms and I can tell you that there's still a heck of a lot of VMS out there. Until I hear differently I'm assuming HP will be honouring Compaq's commitment to port VMS to Itanium so that VMS users have an upgrade path.
I always hated VMS (Score:2)
Re:I always hated VMS (Score:2)
Former system admin in the VMS Group
Re:I always hated VMS (Score:2)
VMS didn't leave (Score:4, Informative)
David N. Cutler, the chief software architect of NT, worked for DEC in the 70's. He had designed VMS and worked on releasing newer versions. Cutler became bored doing this so DEC gave him several hundred engineers and computer scientists to work on a next generation CPU and OS.
In 1988, DEC laid many on David N. Cutler's team and nuked both projects. He was fairly ticked off and left Digital only to be hired by Microsoft, bringing quite a few former DEC guys with him.
Cutler designed NT very similarly to how he designed VMS and Microsoft actually licensed several parts of VMS from DEC in a cross-licensing agreement in which DEC got the chance to use some of the Windows API in pure VMS. (How useful this was to DEC is questionable...)
So despite Microsoft marketing that NT is a cutting-end OS and even naming it "New technology," like Unix it is still based 1970's ideas and code.
As for pure VMS, my school uses it for both the C and the Pascal classes.
DirecTV uses it for their billing system called STMS. (How I found this out has plenty to do with
I have found that it is very similar to DOS on steroids. It uses very similar commands, uses forward slashes `/' for parameters, uses extentions for file names (the same ones as DOS;
Some differences: Its C compiler sucks, it never overwrites old files but instead makes files of a similar name (foo.c, foo.c;2, foo.c;3 etc.), its memory manager is famous for being fairly slow (though DOS has no memory management to speak of), and it makes a good server OS. Unfortunately if you want to run it, you have the choice between VAX and Alpha, neither of which are particularly common machines.
You can run quite a bit of Unix software on these things just fine if you compile it letting the make script know that the system is VMS.
Re:VMS didn't leave (Score:2)
This is why the largest electronic derivatives exchange in the world [eurexchange.com] runs on VMS. Many other exchanges also use VMS. They do so for a reason, it takes on a bundle of work and doesn't die. If you have redundant hardware, it will stay up for ever, just failing over between hardware when it craps out.
Incidentally, Cutler started by writing RSX-11M then 11M+, a 16-bit operating system. He then went onto writing VMS and later the Digital PL/1 compiler before he left.
Digital got very little from MS apart from the promise to use their hardware platform for NT. The Windows API definitely has no relation to any of the APIs on VMS although some bits may be similar because of the former Digital engineers.
As the for command language, the original DOS/CPM commands derived from another 16-bit Digital operating system, RSTS/E. Both RSTS/E and M+ eventually started supporting Digital Command Language (DCL) which became fully developed under VMS (much like a Unix shell). The file types go back to the RSTS/E and RSX days.
The version numbers that you complain about are a feature of the VMS file system. They allow you to keep a few old versions of files around easily so you always have the possibility to revert to a previous version.
They memory manager is not particularly slow unless there is a high demand for memory and not enough physical memory available, and even Linux has problems there. The real issue of VMS as a platform is the overhead associated with process creation, now partly circumvented with threads.
Re:VMS didn't leave (Score:3, Insightful)
All of these owe the basic structure of the CLI and file naming conventions (forward slash for parameters, 3-letter file extensions, etc) to the older PDP-10 operating system which dates back to the 1960s. The same basic CLI and file naming conventions were also supported by OS/8, DEC's PDP-8 operating system written mostly by Richie Lary.
OS/8's sources named it the "*bleep*" operating system, otherwise known as the First Upward Compatible Keyboard Monitor, or FUCK'M, operating system for the PDP-8. When Richie first proposed writing a PDP-8 operating system that was command-level compatible with the 36-bit PDP-10 timesharing operating system (thus the "upward compatible keyboard monitor" moniker), he was told "no" so wrote the first version of OS/8 on the sly. The acronym described his personal feelings towards management at the time, and later it became the standard single-user PDP-8 operating system.
Personally I think all of Dave Cutler's OS's more or less sucked, starting with RSX-11M and still true today with NT.
Re:VMS didn't leave (Score:2)
M support for paged memory (necessary for the PDP-11/60 and 70) was officially opposed by management because of the RSX-11D system (similarly named but no relation) had the place at the top of the range. Cutler implemented the changes in a weekend "for in-house debugging purposes because Digital had a lot of 11/60s around at one stage". The hack became known outside (the customers had the Exec source code and the SYSGEN tool so it was obviously there) and Digital was pressed to support it. Towards the end RSX had shared libraries, I and D space support and many other neat ideas (including a modularised exec). Many of these concepts didn't travel again to VMS until comparatively recent times.
Whilst Cutler was a good exec 'hacker', I guess he had problems in larger teams and this is perhaps why NT sucks so much. Many of the issues with NT seem to come down from weak leadership, leading to the API of the month competition. Note that the original NT design had the GUI running in user-space. It was too slow, so MS moved it to kernel space, bugs and all, which then haunted NT up until Win2000.
Re:VMS didn't leave (Score:2)
Which is an issue NT inherited... Hence all the fuss made comparing NT and Linux thread handling.
Re:VMS didn't leave (Score:2)
Re:VMS didn't leave (Score:2, Interesting)
Umm... in a word, "no".
VMS is not similar to DOS on steroids; maybe DCL looks like a DOS interpreter to you, but the underlying operating system is vastly different from that toy program loader called DOS. Calling them similar is just wrong. Besides, very few people have ever seen the aspects of Windows NT that resembled VMS; it most certainly isn't in the command line.
"It's C compiler sucks" You must be joking. DEC is famous for having some of the best compiler gurus; historically, their compilers have always been among the best, both in speed and code generation. Tartan was the only company I recall that could beat DEC on a VAX, and no one's yet matched them for code generation on Alpha. That VMS would somehow ship with inferior compilers doesn't make sense.
"It never overwrites old files..." Many like this feature: by putting those hooks in at the filesystem level, all commands automatically inherit file versioning. When you're certain you don't need the old versions any longer, you can clean up with a single command. And, finally, if you really don't like it, you can turn it off.
"It's memory manager is famous for being fairly slow..." I don't get this one at all. Are you referring to the system pager? Packet lists and non-dynamic pages? Page files? All of these size parameters are well-known (famous?), but more importantly, all can be tweaked via SYSGEN to your heart's delight. Nobody who can read a manual suffers from a slow memory subsystem on their VMS box.
"You can run quite a bit of Unix software on these things just fine..." It would be better to say that you can get POSIX compatibility under VMS. If you write for POSIX, yeah, you could get your code going under VMS. But many Linux/*BSD hackers these days neither know nor care about POSIX (not without good reason, I might add, POSIX.1 was seriously flawed in some respects), so I really have to question "quite a bit".
I don't like to nitpick, but your post does a real disservice to the VMS folks out there. I haven't seriously used VMS since the 4.x days, and am only marginally aware of the current state of OpenVMS, so I'm quite willing to be corrected. But, even older versions of VMS say otherwise about your comments.
Re:VMS didn't leave (Score:2)
That is what I was referring to is the CLI. Regarding the underlying architecture being dissimilar to DOS: My post illustrated that itself. I know. Just the fact that VMS is, as I said, a multiuser OS makes it vastly different underneath.
Just as many people see little difference between Windows ME and Windows NT and talk about interface similarities, so too was I talking about interface similarities. The difference being I know the differences are more than skin deep.
"It's C compiler sucks" You must be joking. DEC is famous for having some of the best compiler gurus; historically, their compilers have always been among the best, both in speed and code generation. Tartan was the only company I recall that could beat DEC on a VAX, and no one's yet matched them for code generation on Alpha. That VMS would somehow ship with inferior compilers doesn't make sense."I wasn't referring to the speed of code generated as much as the irritation of using it. Granted, I did not check what version of the C compiler I was using, but it was lacking in some features. It's fflush(); worked erratically (though that has more to do with the libs than the compile I bet) and it didn't even support "//" comments. Granted, "//" was a C++ (not C) standard until C99, but nearly every other compiler I have used supports it perfectly. Looking back these may seem to be very minor but did not leave a good impression about the software. Perhaps saying that the compiler sucks was a bit of an overstatement.
"It never overwrites old files..." Many like this feature: by putting those hooks in at the filesystem level, all commands automatically inherit file versioning. Yes some people really like this feature--I am sure it has saved many people from a horrible death, but many people including myself actually find it irritating. This would probably not be the case were I more used to it, but I have become accustomed to my own ways of versioning and do not particularly like the extra step. Additionally, the file names generated for versioning are often difficult to associate unless one keeps close mental track of their saves. My foo() function isn't working now, but it was working three days ago. Was that in bar.c;27 or bar.c;39?
Yes, you can still version yourself, for example simply making copies of files at important points in time and naming them appropriately, but having a default system tends to discourage people from using that, just as a PC coming with Windows 98 discourages use of something better like Win2K or an alternative OS. Human laziness? Probably.
Nobody who can read a manual suffers from a slow memory subsystem on their VMS box.I can't read. Sorry.
I'm quite willing to be corrected. But, even older versions of VMS say otherwise about your comments.So am I, and no problem here. You clearly know more about VMS than I, and I appreciate your input.
Re:VMS didn't leave (Score:4, Interesting)
Another feature I really like about VMS is the performance reporting tools that are built (??) into it. Every time I run load tests without telling my admin, he starts sending me graphs about what I did to the machines and do I know anything about it, plus if I can ask him for data from 2 months ago, and he's likely to have it.
Stephen
P.S. I say 'casual' because I just can't get into the 'set def mylogical:[sub_dir]' sort of stuff that our applications require.
Re:VMS didn't leave (Score:2)
I still don't konw what OpenVMS does as I couldn't determine that after over an hour with Google. However, looking at the semantics of the DELETE and PURGE commands it looks like you can get remove arbitrary versions of files. So, I guess each version is a complete copy (or can become one when you delete earlier versions).
Ok. Ziti and Sopranos time. Let's hear it for season 3!
Regards,
Stephen
Re:VMS didn't leave (Score:2)
One the best proprietary systems going (Score:1)
Re:One the best proprietary systems going (Score:2)
And it is still stable which is why it is being used for electronic trading.
Re:PL/I, VAX/C and David Cutler (Score:2)
VAX/VMS recollections (Score:1)
* Very good C compiler *for the time*. Used it extensively in early 80s at EDS & GM
* Excellent system level IPC. The Message Box interfaces were extremely easy to use. Easily built large distributed systems with these.
* Excellent, multi-layer security model. Much better than the Unix model(s) even today.
* Good network *at the time*. DecNet beat the pants off IBM SNA for engineering and distributed systems work. Faded gradually with the rise of IP. Don't know if anyone still builds DecNet networks except in the CCIE labs.
VMS lives in MI (Score:2, Interesting)
Michigan's child support system runs on it, or most of it does. Finally last year pieces of it started getting replaced with an Oracle back end and Java (urg) front end. But at this moment most of the state's child support personnel log onto a VMS system via terminal emulators.
Frankly I find the old application much more responsive and pleasant to use. I'm sure in just 5 or 10 years of bug fixes the new system will be just as good ;)
Thevax.org (Score:2, Informative)
If you like VMS, run NT 3.51 SP 5 (Score:3, Informative)
Test Drive (Score:2, Informative)
Memories and other missing data (Score:2)
I never used VMS, and I was ignorant of the VMS-NT connection. I lost my chance to use VMS when my school got its first VAX, and decided to run Unix on it instead of VMS. The decision was not universally popular on campus! Unix was still a work in progress. In particular, Bill Joy and his bunch at Berkeley were still hacking out a Unix that could make proper use of the VAX's memory management hardware.
It's funny. We think of the rivalry between Linux and NT as part of the broader conflict between Microsoft and various anti-Microsoft forces: the open-source community, MS's competitors and detractors, etc. But it seems that it's partly a continuation of the decades-old rivalry between Unix and VMS!
some things I miss about VMS (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:some things I miss about VMS (Score:2)
The project apparently died because it was unreasonably slow due to the fact that the Clu compiler produced lots of function calls, like for every multiply.
So I'm not sure if the uniform calling convention is a win. Linux actually is doing ok with wrapper libraries around C code like all the Perl and Python wrapper libs.
From a button (Score:2)
VAX/VMS - Software for the Sixties.
Re:VMS (hacking, stability, etc.) (Score:2)
Digital really screwed up with their earlier IP support under VMS. It seems to work ok now, but rgrettably much of the port seems to have been done by people who didn't understand VMS well enough or the Unix implementation layer.
I take issue with what you say on the I/O. The problem is that few people worked out that in VMS, an I/O operation is expensive so it is advqntageous to transfer more than a byte at a time. I agree that the checking and logging costs, but how often did you have to do an ANALYZE/DISK/REPAIR on VMS? Even on a disk that was cluster mounted, the files seemed quite safe since VMS V3.1.
RMS is great too, as long as you use it and don't try to layer another file system on top of it.
This and VMS clusters is why some people I know can't get away from it yet. All of this could be implemented under Linux (roll your own file system - no worries). The trouble is that management is worried about large scale systems programming, they want a vendor to do it (and be blamed if things go wrong).