4 ms·

I'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 usag

I'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 ago
Which emulator did you use? Simh?
- jle17 10y ago
  Not 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 ago
    What's the easiest way to get OpenVMS these days?
    - michrassena 10y ago
      The 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 ago
  I 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.

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 ago

Which emulator did you use? Simh?

jle17 10y ago
Not 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 ago
  What's the easiest way to get OpenVMS these days?
  - michrassena 10y ago
    The 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 ago
I 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.