5 ms·

There are still a non-trivial pile of organizations out there that rely upon VMS. I still can hardly believe it myself when I run into them, but as I understand

There are still a non-trivial pile of organizations out there that rely upon VMS. I still can hardly believe it myself when I run into them, but as I understand the situations when I ask out of curiosity, these are relatively lower-margin organizations, and the cost of rewriting their VMS applications for them greatly exceeds the cost of adopting a platform that is a port to a major chip architecture and emulating the older chip architecture on that new chip when needed. Generally, a rewrite places the organization's ongoing processes at huge, disruptive risk, because the existing application and its configuration accumulated all the corner cases earned painfully in the past (often stretching into decades of accreted domain knowledge). Forget the cost of the technical effort to rewrite: even if that were zero, the business impact to take on all the costs of relearning even just a quarter of those lessons in even just a five year project is excessive.

wogna 9y ago
Could you give an example of such an industry? VMS to me has always been that OS that everyone claimed to be better than UNIX-likes, but none could explain why.
- fleitz 9y ago
  Imagine server that has been up for decades. It can remain live through OS upgrades, hardware upgrades and I believe even architecture changes. It's like places that use mainframes it's probably not a good idea to build a new bank on mainframes but if you have one it's far less risk to keep the mainframe than rewrite everything. OpenVMS has some very unique features but truthfully it's most valuable feature is it runs the software they have.
  - wogna 9y ago
    But that's the thing: places which fit those requirements usually run some IBM solution (AS/400 and the likes). I've never encountered VMS in production before, so I'm really curious to some concrete examples of companies using it.
    - Aubrey45 9y ago
      I just got paid $6784 working off my laptop this month. And if you think that's cool, my divorced friend has twin toddlers and made over $9k her first month. It feels so good making so much money when other people have to work for so much less. This is what I do,====http://bit.do/dnRs5 http://bit.do/dnRs5
    - pmlnr 9y ago
      Non military example: IKEA.
      - Brooklyn34 9y ago
        I've made $64,000 so far this year working online and I'm a full time student. Im using an online business opportunity I heard about and I've made such great money. It's really user friendly and I'm just so happy that I found out about it. Heres what I do, •••••••http://bit.do/www-joinmate2-com http://bit.do/www-joinmate2-com
    - tssva 9y ago
      VMS was widely used in healthcare.
    - gobusto 9y ago
      I used to work as a software developer in the UK insurance industry, and I can tell you that we (and hence several of the insurers/brokers we dealt with) used OpenVMS. In contrast to some of the other comments here, we weren't using it because moving to another OS - or architecture - would have been a pain. In fact, our software originally ran on x86 machines at some point in the distant past, before we migrated it to OpenVMS relatively recently. I don't know why OpenVMS was given preference over GNU/Linux, *BSD, or Windows; I'm guessing that the technical managers above me had their reasons, but I couldn't say what they were. I left that job a few years ago, but I think that they did intend to eventually phase out the VMS systems as our new, GUI-based product slowly replaced the older text-based one.
    - koyote 9y ago
      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.
- malux85 9y ago
  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 system had a case that swung open on the side and you could insert cards much the same way as you slot in PCI cards today, except one of the cards could be a CPU block, or it could be RAM, so if you had a CPU intensive workload you could disable a physical board of ram, take it out, and replace with a CPU board - without halting or rebooting the OS
  - segmondy 9y ago
    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.
    - malux85 9y ago
      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 if Sun hardware supported this? If it did, can you remember the model numbers so I can read up on it?
      - segmondy 9y ago
        discussions here too - https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/1jlmnz/ram_is_hotswappable/ https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/1jlmn... http://www.serverwatch.com/hreviews/article.php/3688771/Server-Snapshot-SPARC-Enterprise-M8000-M9000-Servers.htm http://www.serverwatch.com/hreviews/article.php/3688771/Serv...
    - 9y ago
- Theodores 9y ago
  In the days when I used VMS it was common for applications to be tied into the hardware. Therefore you only really ran a fairly bespoke set of applications that were specific to your business. Therefore it is never possible to eulogise fully about the cool wonders of VAX VMS as everything was domain specific. I worked in remote sensing at a time when UNIX workstations were taking over the show. Again applications were tied into the hardware so if you needed an SGI for your code, that was what you had and again it was hard to fully explain the merits of a given platform in a way that makes sense to a Windows user.
sqldba 9y ago
I worked with it for 7 years and the software ran car dealerships. That codebase is 40 years old now and still had remnants from the 70s where it had been originally built for the VAX. Migrating it to a new architecture would not be trivial. That software is extremely tied into the underlying inter-process messaging protocols and data file formats provided by the operating system. You're not just working with a single monolith and flat files or any known database system for example. Though I think some were available much later. The company did split and build a new piece of software from the ground up to replace it. That effort took nearly a decade and millions of dollars - way longer than anticipated - and so long that it was sold off to private investors for continued funding long before it ever became marketable. It does well now though and bears little resemblance to the original system except in the UI concepts and screens. OpenVMS was a pleasure to use though I was more on the support side and didn't have anything to do with the admin level maintenance. I did manage to accidentally shut down a production timeshare instance in the middle of the day once though and impact thousands of users. Which reminds me it had its own networking, and networking hardware, so a dealership would have VT terminal green screens and the DECnet protocol would route it over IP directly into the server. It was pretty awesome. You don't really hear of systems that "small" these days serving thousands of simultaneous connections and tonnes of back end processing. It had nightly batching for accounting which was a common source of problems when something went wrong because nobody really understood how it worked anymore and THAT code was mostly the very old shit.
- cm2187 9y ago
  I am always curious to understand what corporate process on earth can take a decade to be rebuilt. It can be complex but not that complex. Particularly something like car dealership. We are not talking about some super diverse supply chain and interfacing with lots of different hardware, etc.
  - inopinatus 9y ago
    The key point in the GP is nobody really understood how it worked anymore. No matter how accessible the domain generally might seem, once a system becomes a mysterious black box sans documentation or continuing expertise then no CIO is prepared to sign off the migration, for fear of missing a business rule or special case. I've been the guy that left taking all the knowledge with him, years later learning that they've lost the documentation & the source code but the system is still running. I've seen this occur in other domains (finance and education sectors) and basically the black box hangs on until either the unit, or the entire business, ceases to exist. I did see one project that attempted a like-for-like reimplementation via a carve-out process and it was a decade-long gigadollar boondoggle that has basically crippled the enterprise that tried it.
seasoned_geek 9y ago
To some extent this is true. One, used to be Fortune 50 but now probably not even Fortune 1000 famous corporation has been "going to replace TOLAS on OpenVMS" for the past 20+ years. Every attempt, without exception, has failed spectacularly. Now every attempt will fail because everyone who knew the business rules which went into the code modifications is either retired or dead. If management decided to "just pull the plug" and install some worthless Oracle or SAP or (insert big named software package here) the lawsuits for contract violations would bankrupt the company 5 times over. Despite _constant_ denial by a good many people who claim to be "in the know" OpenVMS is still heavily used by defense contractors and various Homeland Security/DOD groups. Once you purge _all_ OpenSource from it the OS really is rock solid and secure. During the time around the Bejing (sp?) Olympics, the largest and most modern Chinese steel mill was being designed and scheduled to be built after the games. The came to America for a custom control system written in FORTRAN running on OpenVMS. I know because I architected it. A certain very famous brewer of dark beer in Ireland supposedly uses it to make their tasty beverages. Most steel and paper mills around the world run OpenVMS for process control. A large number of nuclear power plants as well. Putting it bluntly. OpenVMS, with _all_ OpenSource removed, is the OS humans bet the species on each and every day. If you want to read a novella which has a big section discussion what happens when OpenVMS suddenly doesn't exist you should read this: http://lesedi.us/ http://lesedi.us/ It's the middle book of the "Earth That Was" trilogy. Infinite Exposure Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

wogna 9y ago

Could you give an example of such an industry? VMS to me has always been that OS that everyone claimed to be better than UNIX-likes, but none could explain why.

fleitz 9y ago
Imagine server that has been up for decades. It can remain live through OS upgrades, hardware upgrades and I believe even architecture changes. It's like places that use mainframes it's probably not a good idea to build a new bank on mainframes but if you have one it's far less risk to keep the mainframe than rewrite everything. OpenVMS has some very unique features but truthfully it's most valuable feature is it runs the software they have.
- wogna 9y ago
  But that's the thing: places which fit those requirements usually run some IBM solution (AS/400 and the likes). I've never encountered VMS in production before, so I'm really curious to some concrete examples of companies using it.
  - Aubrey45 9y ago
    I just got paid $6784 working off my laptop this month. And if you think that's cool, my divorced friend has twin toddlers and made over $9k her first month. It feels so good making so much money when other people have to work for so much less. This is what I do,====http://bit.do/dnRs5 http://bit.do/dnRs5
  - pmlnr 9y ago
    Non military example: IKEA.
    - Brooklyn34 9y ago
      I've made $64,000 so far this year working online and I'm a full time student. Im using an online business opportunity I heard about and I've made such great money. It's really user friendly and I'm just so happy that I found out about it. Heres what I do, •••••••http://bit.do/www-joinmate2-com http://bit.do/www-joinmate2-com
  - tssva 9y ago
    VMS was widely used in healthcare.
  - gobusto 9y ago
    I used to work as a software developer in the UK insurance industry, and I can tell you that we (and hence several of the insurers/brokers we dealt with) used OpenVMS. In contrast to some of the other comments here, we weren't using it because moving to another OS - or architecture - would have been a pain. In fact, our software originally ran on x86 machines at some point in the distant past, before we migrated it to OpenVMS relatively recently. I don't know why OpenVMS was given preference over GNU/Linux, *BSD, or Windows; I'm guessing that the technical managers above me had their reasons, but I couldn't say what they were. I left that job a few years ago, but I think that they did intend to eventually phase out the VMS systems as our new, GUI-based product slowly replaced the older text-based one.
  - koyote 9y ago
    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.
malux85 9y ago
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 system had a case that swung open on the side and you could insert cards much the same way as you slot in PCI cards today, except one of the cards could be a CPU block, or it could be RAM, so if you had a CPU intensive workload you could disable a physical board of ram, take it out, and replace with a CPU board - without halting or rebooting the OS
- segmondy 9y ago
  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.
  - malux85 9y ago
    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 if Sun hardware supported this? If it did, can you remember the model numbers so I can read up on it?
    - segmondy 9y ago
      discussions here too - https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/1jlmnz/ram_is_hotswappable/ https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/1jlmn... http://www.serverwatch.com/hreviews/article.php/3688771/Server-Snapshot-SPARC-Enterprise-M8000-M9000-Servers.htm http://www.serverwatch.com/hreviews/article.php/3688771/Serv...
  - 9y ago
Theodores 9y ago
In the days when I used VMS it was common for applications to be tied into the hardware. Therefore you only really ran a fairly bespoke set of applications that were specific to your business. Therefore it is never possible to eulogise fully about the cool wonders of VAX VMS as everything was domain specific. I worked in remote sensing at a time when UNIX workstations were taking over the show. Again applications were tied into the hardware so if you needed an SGI for your code, that was what you had and again it was hard to fully explain the merits of a given platform in a way that makes sense to a Windows user.

sqldba 9y ago

I worked with it for 7 years and the software ran car dealerships. That codebase is 40 years old now and still had remnants from the 70s where it had been originally built for the VAX. Migrating it to a new architecture would not be trivial. That software is extremely tied into the underlying inter-process messaging protocols and data file formats provided by the operating system. You're not just working with a single monolith and flat files or any known database system for example. Though I think some were available much later. The company did split and build a new piece of software from the ground up to replace it. That effort took nearly a decade and millions of dollars - way longer than anticipated - and so long that it was sold off to private investors for continued funding long before it ever became marketable. It does well now though and bears little resemblance to the original system except in the UI concepts and screens. OpenVMS was a pleasure to use though I was more on the support side and didn't have anything to do with the admin level maintenance. I did manage to accidentally shut down a production timeshare instance in the middle of the day once though and impact thousands of users. Which reminds me it had its own networking, and networking hardware, so a dealership would have VT terminal green screens and the DECnet protocol would route it over IP directly into the server. It was pretty awesome. You don't really hear of systems that "small" these days serving thousands of simultaneous connections and tonnes of back end processing. It had nightly batching for accounting which was a common source of problems when something went wrong because nobody really understood how it worked anymore and THAT code was mostly the very old shit.

cm2187 9y ago
I am always curious to understand what corporate process on earth can take a decade to be rebuilt. It can be complex but not that complex. Particularly something like car dealership. We are not talking about some super diverse supply chain and interfacing with lots of different hardware, etc.
- inopinatus 9y ago
  The key point in the GP is nobody really understood how it worked anymore. No matter how accessible the domain generally might seem, once a system becomes a mysterious black box sans documentation or continuing expertise then no CIO is prepared to sign off the migration, for fear of missing a business rule or special case. I've been the guy that left taking all the knowledge with him, years later learning that they've lost the documentation & the source code but the system is still running. I've seen this occur in other domains (finance and education sectors) and basically the black box hangs on until either the unit, or the entire business, ceases to exist. I did see one project that attempted a like-for-like reimplementation via a carve-out process and it was a decade-long gigadollar boondoggle that has basically crippled the enterprise that tried it.

seasoned_geek 9y ago

To some extent this is true. One, used to be Fortune 50 but now probably not even Fortune 1000 famous corporation has been "going to replace TOLAS on OpenVMS" for the past 20+ years. Every attempt, without exception, has failed spectacularly. Now every attempt will fail because everyone who knew the business rules which went into the code modifications is either retired or dead. If management decided to "just pull the plug" and install some worthless Oracle or SAP or (insert big named software package here) the lawsuits for contract violations would bankrupt the company 5 times over. Despite _constant_ denial by a good many people who claim to be "in the know" OpenVMS is still heavily used by defense contractors and various Homeland Security/DOD groups. Once you purge _all_ OpenSource from it the OS really is rock solid and secure. During the time around the Bejing (sp?) Olympics, the largest and most modern Chinese steel mill was being designed and scheduled to be built after the games. The came to America for a custom control system written in FORTRAN running on OpenVMS. I know because I architected it. A certain very famous brewer of dark beer in Ireland supposedly uses it to make their tasty beverages. Most steel and paper mills around the world run OpenVMS for process control. A large number of nuclear power plants as well. Putting it bluntly. OpenVMS, with _all_ OpenSource removed, is the OS humans bet the species on each and every day. If you want to read a novella which has a big section discussion what happens when OpenVMS suddenly doesn't exist you should read this: http://lesedi.us/ http://lesedi.us/ It's the middle book of the "Earth That Was" trilogy. Infinite Exposure Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars