4 ms·
still worth checking out? or just worth checking out? The coherency of VMS (and the VAX platform) is quite amazing - Coherent command line interfaces, API's,
by cat199 10y ago
still worth checking out? or just worth checking out?
The coherency of VMS (and the VAX platform) is quite amazing -
Coherent command line interfaces, API's, documentation, hardware, and software, even down to coherent part numbering made by a single company, from small workstations up to larger scale minis, and nearly transparent clustering.
I mention VAX specifically, since by the time Alpha arrived, DEC was competing in a much different environment, and was subsequently merged, etc etc etc.
IBM and other mainframe-ey OS's, though definately arcane, have some amazing facilities (parallel sysplex.. multi architecture systems that are completely
redundant and hot-swappable) and capabilities since the late 60s/70s which are only now being caught upto in crude and hackish form at the present time with commmercial PC servers.
BeOS had some cool concepts.
- michrassena 10y agoI've installed and played around with VMS on an emulator and even on my own VaxStation, but never used it in a production environment. I'm sure real world usage left a lot to be desired, but my impressions are that VMS as a product was well-rounded, feels complete as if there aren't a lot of loose ends. In contrast to the unix philosophy, VMS feels DESIGNED, as if the people working on it had a coherent idea of the way the entire system was supposed to work and its components interroperated. The documentation is superb. Linux distro maintainers would do good to revisit VMS docs from time to time to see how its done. The versioning filesystem is something I've waited for since I first used VMS (1991) and discovered such a thing existed. Though to be fair recent Windows and OSX versions have something like it, it's not the same.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago"VMS feels DESIGNED" It was. This is one of the reasons outside of its legendary reliability that I keep bringing it up. It's a cathedral where most things fit. There was cruft to deal with. Overall, the pieces work very well together as the teams had a coherent vision for how they wanted the system to work. It also integrates solutions to problems such as distributed locking and node failures that other systems dump on the app developers. Not to mention I never got these testimonials or personal experiences when I started with UNIX... http://h41379.www4.hpe.com/openvms/30th/t_guestbook.html http://h41379.www4.hpe.com/openvms/30th/t_guestbook.html
- slrz 10y agoWhich emulator did you use? Simh?
- jle17 10y agoNot OP but I recently installed OpenVMS 7.3 on Simh following this guide [1], (ignoring the building Simh part) and it works like a charm. [1] https://www.wherry.com/gadgets/retrocomputing/vax-simh.html https://www.wherry.com/gadgets/retrocomputing/vax-simh.html
- oxryly1 10y agoWhat's the easiest way to get OpenVMS these days?
- michrassena 10y agoThe official site is here: http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/news.php http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/news.php You can sign up as a hobbyist here: http://plato.ccsscorp.com/hobbyist_registration.php http://plato.ccsscorp.com/hobbyist_registration.php someone will email you in the next day or so with a license installer and the URLs to download the software. Also they have the Alpha version of OpenVMS available.
- michrassena 10y agoI used Simh Vax, but I've also used Charon-VAX in the past when they were allowing free usage of the software (I don't know the current situation). Charon was quite fast at the time on the hardware I had in maybe 2008 or so. But I've used Simh recently and it's plenty fast enough on modern hardware.