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Windows NT was a spiritual successor to VMS, sharing a father in DEC's Dave Cutler. VMS fell out of use and is widely considered history. Still, it had some int
by nxc18 9y ago
Windows NT was a spiritual successor to VMS, sharing a father in DEC's Dave Cutler. VMS fell out of use and is widely considered history. Still, it had some interesting ideas and I've always preferred my history to be living.
- derefr 9y agoMy question is, which of those "interesting ideas" didn't end up in Windows NT? Is there anything other OSes (Linux, ⋆BSD, macOS) could learn from VMS, that they can't better learn from WNT?
- DaiPlusPlus 9y agoThe "everything is a file" paradigm and a non-physical filesystem come to mind.
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- protomyth 9y agoClustering - OpenVMS does clustering amazingly well. that is one thing that NT, Linux, and the BSDs could learn. Although, DragonFly BSD is working on the file system clustering with HAMMER 2.
- wogna 9y agoCould you elaborate on how it did things better than the common cluster file systems of today? (OCFS2, Hadoop, Ceph, etc.)
- valarauca1 9y agoOkay so OpenVMS wasn't just FileSystem clustering. It was physical PC clustering. So I group of networked computers appeared like 1 physical computer. While a MESO or DCOS can do this today, they don't offer durability. On OpenVMS clusters if the machine running a job physically explodes you don't lose data. RAM and process state is network synchronized. This allows for rolling upgrades. Your cluster can update and reboot 1 box at a time, but your apps never actually stop, TCP connections are never dropped ETC. For large corporations who've gotten used to these features they're awesome to hold onto.
- reitanqild 9y agoTCP connections are never dropped ETC One thing I wonder now: how can this work? Is there a physical load balancer in front or something?
- eej71 9y agoThat claim is simply not true.
- MrBuddyCasino 9y ago"RAM and process state is network synchronized." Is this as slow as it sounds?
- staofbur 9y agoYes. I saw the last days of a VMS cluster (actual VAX not Alpha) system being ported to windows/vb/com/asp. The speed difference was actually incredible. It ended up on a mediocre single Xeon 500MHz P3. At the end of the day, the windows based system was just as reliable as far as nines went and tens of times faster. This was only just recently replaced with asp.net I understand. They got nearly 20 years out of each rewrite.
- lb1lf 9y agoPlease bear with the lack of details, as my (very limited) VMS experience involved an offline system which never broke, but: it is amazingly tolerant of hardware failures, I recall sitting slack-jawed over the AlphaStation manual after learning you could hot-swap just about anything - including CPU boards! Granted, that is as much (if not more!) a feature of the hardware architecture than the OS - but amazing still. I've never heard of an NT box capable of that - maybe the Alpha port could do it? Anyone know?
- iheartmemcache 9y agoFun fact: Windows 2008 R2 and Itanium 2 had lock-step fault-tolerance. (Which is on par with the other "biggies"-- VMS, IBMs OS360/MVS, and HP (nee Compaq Tandem)). On a more relevant note, I know x86-64 Xeon's can mark bad RAM, disk drives, and network cards, and hot-swap them all out out (and has been able to do so for > 10 years) on most motherboards (it's supported at the OS level for Windows server), not sure if it ever had full CPU failure support though.