8 ms·

OpenVMS on x86

93 points by gjvc 6y ago

synack 6y ago
Is there a case to be made for developing new software on VMS or is this purely for legacy applications?
- shakna 6y ago
  Probably a little bit of both. Replacing a mainframe with a VM and not losing performance is a huge benefit. But the software that used to run on that mainframe is now easier to modify, and there's a 10 year backlog of critical bugs that need to be fixed but we were always too scared of breaking something because we couldn't test it - now we have a VM. We can spin up a second one.
  - gigatexal 6y ago
    Mainframes are completely different beasts though. A VM on a Xeon machine is not a fair comparison to an app running on a Mainframe because by design the mainframe has many redundant systems to stay online for ever. Lots of dedicated hardware for things and redundant systems etc are the selling point to mission critical hardware that is the mainframe I suspect this is more about not having to pay IBM for the hardware and contracts anymore
    - shakna 6y ago
      I say the same performance with absolute confidence. I expected a drop in performance when a particular contract I worked with asked us to see if we couldn't get everything running on a VM instead of the IBM iron. Like you suspect, that was about not paying for the hardware anymore because just the price of electricity was a noticeable impact on the bank's overall budget. It was an R&D project to see if we could avoid that. What we put together was a QEMU instance, running atop 3 very very cheap commodity servers in duplication, so that if one went down it would switch over without downtime. We chose the cheap servers, because we already had them hanging around. (Probably around $1000 in hardware all up, today.) We did not see a drop in performance or reliance. But we did see an increase in performance. As in, ~30%. I avoided suggesting this is always the case, but it is a significant possibility when changing. As far as I know, the bank in question is now running a similar setup everywhere they used to have a mainframe.
      - gigatexal 6y ago
        Fascinating. If the main mainframe use case is more database ops for banking or airline scheduling that doesn’t seem very compute heavy in my head so throwing hardware at the problem makes sense especially if you can save millions to invest in development and modernization.
        shakna 6y ago
        I agree with you there. Most mainframe tasks today aren't that heavy on the compute - most relied on the amazing I/O stack, and that makes it easier to replace them. Heavily vectorised code with modern instruction sets can also be more performant than a lot of the older compute chips, but that requires more rewriting of code, and someone who intricately understands both the code and the math. Which makes modernising much more expensive. The VM approach is a simpler way to get you most of the way there, but replacing heavy compute stacks is usually going to require a decent bit of investment.
      - exikyut 6y ago
        While reading the parent comment ("stay online for ever") I was reminded of VMware lockstep VMs, which nowadays support up to 4 cores. I wouldn't be surprised if a few places do OpenVMS on lockstep. I am very curious what you mean by "in duplication". Do you mean "3 copies of production and a router" (probably not) - or are you saying you did something like lockstep for QEMU? Incidentally I just found https://wiki.qemu.org/Features/COLO https://wiki.qemu.org/Features/COLO, which looks like it may be being successfully used privately in one or two places (looking at the email addresses).
        shakna 6y ago
        It was a little while ago, but it was 3 production servers running with the mirror backend, with a dirty-bitmap [0], and a complicated routing setup (which could hold packets instead of dropping them, depending on their importance). I didn't really have anything to do with the routing though, so I can't say much. I'd probably use COLO if I was to do it again today. [0] https://kashyapc.fedorapeople.org/QEMU-Docs/_build/html/docs/interop/live-block-operations.html#live-disk-synchronization-drive-mirror-and-blockdev-mirror https://kashyapc.fedorapeople.org/QEMU-Docs/_build/html/docs...
    - zonefuenf 6y ago
      VMS isn’t an IBM mainframe OS, though. I think typical native VMS machines are much closer to normal enterprise servers than mainframes, so virtualization would make sense.
  - roywashere 6y ago
    VMS is old and used to run multiuser systems and on relatively expensive machines; but they were called 'minicomputers' because they were already less huge/expensive than mainframes. And after the mini came the 'micro' which is more or less the PC as you know it.
    - bdavis__ 6y ago
      i would call a vax a "super mini". one of the crop of 32 bit multi-user systems that came out in the 80's. a pdp-11 was a mini, it was multi-user, but the machine was weak. a 'super mini', with 16MB of memory, now that was a machine you could do great things with.
      - kjs3 6y ago
        The VAX succeeded the PDP, though the PDP was kept in production for many years of overlap. They're different generation of technology filling the same niche. The PDP-11/70 was the beast of it's day, and even came in a multi-processor version (the 11/74). Saying the PDP was a mini and the VAX was a supermini is like saying the 286 was a mini but the 386 was a supermini.
- throw0101a 6y ago
  > Is there a case to be made for developing new software […] I think one decent case would be to keep yourself honest. Linux started out a 80386 only, but someone ported it to DEC Alpha. By deciding to run on both 32- and 64-bit platforms in the 1990s, it kept the kernel developers agnostic. Then when the x86 world went 64-bit with amd64, there was probably a lot less 'cleanly up' to do for it to be ported compared to if it had been focused on pure-x86 (see also SPARC and endianness). It's said that NetBSD has a very clean code base because of it's reputed high portability. Similarly Solaris was very scalable. Partly because in 1996 Sun released the SPARCcenter 2000, which could handle 20 CPU sockets. That was a lot, and I'm guessing not many folks bought one, but they had to deal with it in an official capacity, as time when on more CPUs (and cores) became prevalent Solaris was good to go as that situation became more mainstream. If you develop for the odd ball situations and corner cases, it may force you to be less lazy as a programmer.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - huslage 6y ago
    I ran a fully populated SPARCcenter 2000. It was a beast. Not like the E10K, but still a beast.
  - bcantrill 6y ago
    You are absolutely correct; anyone who worked on Solaris scalability and performance back in the day will have plenty of Dragon war stories -- and Solaris did so well on Campfire (a.k.a. UltraSPARC Enterprise 4000, shipped 1996) exactly because so much time and energy had been spent on Dragon (a.k.a. SPARCcenter 2000, shipped 1992).
    - throw0101a 6y ago
      > Campfire (a.k.a. UltraSPARC Enterprise 4000, shipped 1996) My main gripe with the various 'E-series' systems (IIRC, we had some E3x00s) was boot-up time, especially the RAM check on power up. I was in an academic environment, and so every so often we had to power down our lab for electrical/fire code inspection power outages by Facilities. The first time we rebooted one (with 4GB of RAM?) it kept booting and booting and booting and booting and booting and booting. 17 minutes later we got the login prompt on the console. We put the 17 minutes as a note in our run book so that we knew not to worry if took 'forever' and to move onto the next step. Otherwise we'd start freaking out about something being "broken" with the system(s). (This was in the 2001-2001 timeframe.)
082349872349872 6y ago
Does OpenVMS still support logging out via 'DISCODUCK'? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynWhozyOoZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynWhozyOoZQ
- malux85 6y ago
  Please, I hope this is a thing. If not, I'll code the implementation.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    Looks like it ought to still be a thing: http://h30266.www3.hpe.com/odl/vax/opsys/vmsos73/vmsos73/6489/6489pro_005.html http://h30266.www3.hpe.com/odl/vax/opsys/vmsos73/vmsos73/648... > "You can abbreviate a command as long as the abbreviated name remains unique among the defined commands on a system. DCL looks only at the first four characters for uniqueness." and since max command line length seems to be a few K, the masochistic could try instead: $ DISCIPLINEOFPROGRAMMING (are there any other 1976 things in the equivalence set of DISCONNECT?)
    - unixhero 6y ago
      What is this thing? What is this for?
      - geraldcombs 6y ago
        DCL is VMS's command line interface. Commands start with full-on verbs (set, copy, define, print, ...). You can use partial strings in commands as long as they are unique (e.g. "set def" instead of "set default"). Imagine being able to type "pyth" at a bash prompt and it running python. What I think the previous posts are referring to (and which I don't remember from my DCL days) is that apparently DCL only checks the first four characters for uniqueness, so "disc", "discoduck" and "discgolf" match the "disconnect" command.
- unixhero 6y ago
  Skinny hot girls, what's not to like.
non-entity 6y ago
From my understanding there used to be a OpenVMS hobbyist license available for people to use. However the parent company seems to be abandoning it and I had trouble discerning if there was going to be some sort of replacement for it at the time I read about it. Does anyone have any better info about this?
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  The website has a page about a community license [0]. > VMS Software Inc. is excited to announce the availability of the OpenVMS Community License that allows the OpenVMS community members (hobbyists, non-commercial software developers, and others) to obtain an OpenVMS license free of charge. > OpenVMS x86 licenses will be available later as more stable versions of OpenVMS are released for this architecture. [0] https://vmssoftware.com/about/news/2020-07-28-community-license/ https://vmssoftware.com/about/news/2020-07-28-community-lice...
  - non-entity 6y ago
    Ah nice to see they kept something going.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
Will it be faster than in SIMH? Many years ago I tried one of the SIMH VAX simulators on a Windows PC and it was blazingly fast.
- fredoralive 6y ago
  It's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison, as the last VAX VMS was released in 2001, and stopped getting support in 2012. I think the main target for x86 VMS is people with Itanium (or Alpha) hardware wanting some sort of supported future path.
jabl 6y ago
So VMS has gone full circle in terms of target architecture type. CISC (VAX) -> RISC (Alpha) -> VLIW (IA-64) -> CISC (x86).
- doctor_eval 6y ago
  So... given what’s happened to most of those architectures, should we take it as a bad omen that it’s been ported to x86?
  - als0 6y ago
    Yes!
  - boring_twenties 6y ago
    Sounds like a great omen to me.
  - doctor_eval 6y ago
    Well yes I should have said “a bad omen for x86”. I’ve never been a fan of the ISA but then the last time I tried it was 8086... Let’s just hope they don’t port OpenVMS to ARM and RISC-V :)
unixhero 6y ago
Is a hobbyist license generally available? What are the facts? Price? How do I get it?
- voxadam 6y ago
  HPE announced the end of the hobbyist program. IIRC the licenses expire at the end of 2021.
  - unixhero 6y ago
    Sad What a pointless decision. How else shall people learn anything about the system, besides work exposure.
    - icedchai 6y ago
      Anyone who wants to experiment with VMS still can. Right or wrong, old OpenVMS releases may as well be free, for anyone who can do a google search.
- privong 6y ago
  This comment has info about a community license: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24166978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24166978
chmaynard 6y ago
Interesting that their FAQ doesn't mention that VMS source code is proprietary. The name 'OpenVMS' is ambiguous to say the least. https://vmssoftware.com/about/faq/ https://vmssoftware.com/about/faq/ The Wikipedia article about OpenVMS clarifies this in the second paragraph. My point is that the OpenVMS FAQ should address this question because it keeps coming up.
- paulsutter 6y ago
  VMS was renamed OpenVMS in 1991[1] The term “Open Source” was coined in 1998 by a group of people in the free software movement[2] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source-software_movement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source-software_movemen...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - chmaynard 6y ago
    Hence the ambiguity.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      Well, it's the Open Source that is ambiguous then, as it came later as a term... (which, co-incidentally, is one argument of the free/libre software guys too)
  - chasil 6y ago
    Somewhat prior to then renaming, the "Open Software Foundation" was formed by a consortium including IBM, HP, and DEC. This was done because of an uncomfortably close embrace between Sun Solaris and AT&T System V Release 4. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation UNIX on DEC Alpha was originally named OSF/1.
- pjmlp 6y ago
tyingq 6y ago
You can still occasionally find a Vaxstation 3000 for under $300 on eBay, if you're interested in being a purist.
- icedchai 6y ago
  I'm running an AlphaServer DS10L here! It cost me about $275. It feels pretty quick for a ~20 year old machine.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    You got a good deal there. All the Alphas I see for sale are $1k+.
    - icedchai 6y ago
      This was about a year ago when I bought it. Finding a relatively cheap one did take a couple of months. There is a DS10L on there for above $500 right now: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Compaq-AlphaServer-DS10L-DH-71AAA-AA/224031641936 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Compaq-AlphaServer-DS10L-DH-71AAA-A... No indication of the exact model, or what it has for RAM or HDs. I would only buy ones that had a screen shot of the console output, since then you have some confidence that it actually boots.
      - tyingq 6y ago
        I've noticed a lot of that buying old computers on eBay. No listing of basic info like CPU speed, installed ram, cards, etc.
        icedchai 6y ago
        It kind of makes sense. A lot of people have this stuff sitting around for 20+ years and just want to get rid of it. Connecting a serial console cable to a headless rack mount server might be a lost art.
- rst 6y ago
aap_ 6y ago
My (not quite serious) hope is that this will kill x86. After all every other architecture it ever supported died a mysterious death.

OpenVMS on x86

93 points by gjvc 6y ago

synack 6y ago

Is there a case to be made for developing new software on VMS or is this purely for legacy applications?

shakna 6y ago
Probably a little bit of both. Replacing a mainframe with a VM and not losing performance is a huge benefit. But the software that used to run on that mainframe is now easier to modify, and there's a 10 year backlog of critical bugs that need to be fixed but we were always too scared of breaking something because we couldn't test it - now we have a VM. We can spin up a second one.
- gigatexal 6y ago
  Mainframes are completely different beasts though. A VM on a Xeon machine is not a fair comparison to an app running on a Mainframe because by design the mainframe has many redundant systems to stay online for ever. Lots of dedicated hardware for things and redundant systems etc are the selling point to mission critical hardware that is the mainframe I suspect this is more about not having to pay IBM for the hardware and contracts anymore
  - shakna 6y ago
    I say the same performance with absolute confidence. I expected a drop in performance when a particular contract I worked with asked us to see if we couldn't get everything running on a VM instead of the IBM iron. Like you suspect, that was about not paying for the hardware anymore because just the price of electricity was a noticeable impact on the bank's overall budget. It was an R&D project to see if we could avoid that. What we put together was a QEMU instance, running atop 3 very very cheap commodity servers in duplication, so that if one went down it would switch over without downtime. We chose the cheap servers, because we already had them hanging around. (Probably around $1000 in hardware all up, today.) We did not see a drop in performance or reliance. But we did see an increase in performance. As in, ~30%. I avoided suggesting this is always the case, but it is a significant possibility when changing. As far as I know, the bank in question is now running a similar setup everywhere they used to have a mainframe.
    - gigatexal 6y ago
      Fascinating. If the main mainframe use case is more database ops for banking or airline scheduling that doesn’t seem very compute heavy in my head so throwing hardware at the problem makes sense especially if you can save millions to invest in development and modernization.
      - shakna 6y ago
        I agree with you there. Most mainframe tasks today aren't that heavy on the compute - most relied on the amazing I/O stack, and that makes it easier to replace them. Heavily vectorised code with modern instruction sets can also be more performant than a lot of the older compute chips, but that requires more rewriting of code, and someone who intricately understands both the code and the math. Which makes modernising much more expensive. The VM approach is a simpler way to get you most of the way there, but replacing heavy compute stacks is usually going to require a decent bit of investment.
    - exikyut 6y ago
      While reading the parent comment ("stay online for ever") I was reminded of VMware lockstep VMs, which nowadays support up to 4 cores. I wouldn't be surprised if a few places do OpenVMS on lockstep. I am very curious what you mean by "in duplication". Do you mean "3 copies of production and a router" (probably not) - or are you saying you did something like lockstep for QEMU? Incidentally I just found https://wiki.qemu.org/Features/COLO https://wiki.qemu.org/Features/COLO, which looks like it may be being successfully used privately in one or two places (looking at the email addresses).
      - shakna 6y ago
        It was a little while ago, but it was 3 production servers running with the mirror backend, with a dirty-bitmap [0], and a complicated routing setup (which could hold packets instead of dropping them, depending on their importance). I didn't really have anything to do with the routing though, so I can't say much. I'd probably use COLO if I was to do it again today. [0] https://kashyapc.fedorapeople.org/QEMU-Docs/_build/html/docs/interop/live-block-operations.html#live-disk-synchronization-drive-mirror-and-blockdev-mirror https://kashyapc.fedorapeople.org/QEMU-Docs/_build/html/docs...
  - zonefuenf 6y ago
    VMS isn’t an IBM mainframe OS, though. I think typical native VMS machines are much closer to normal enterprise servers than mainframes, so virtualization would make sense.
- roywashere 6y ago
  VMS is old and used to run multiuser systems and on relatively expensive machines; but they were called 'minicomputers' because they were already less huge/expensive than mainframes. And after the mini came the 'micro' which is more or less the PC as you know it.
  - bdavis__ 6y ago
    i would call a vax a "super mini". one of the crop of 32 bit multi-user systems that came out in the 80's. a pdp-11 was a mini, it was multi-user, but the machine was weak. a 'super mini', with 16MB of memory, now that was a machine you could do great things with.
    - kjs3 6y ago
      The VAX succeeded the PDP, though the PDP was kept in production for many years of overlap. They're different generation of technology filling the same niche. The PDP-11/70 was the beast of it's day, and even came in a multi-processor version (the 11/74). Saying the PDP was a mini and the VAX was a supermini is like saying the 286 was a mini but the 386 was a supermini.
throw0101a 6y ago
> Is there a case to be made for developing new software […] I think one decent case would be to keep yourself honest. Linux started out a 80386 only, but someone ported it to DEC Alpha. By deciding to run on both 32- and 64-bit platforms in the 1990s, it kept the kernel developers agnostic. Then when the x86 world went 64-bit with amd64, there was probably a lot less 'cleanly up' to do for it to be ported compared to if it had been focused on pure-x86 (see also SPARC and endianness). It's said that NetBSD has a very clean code base because of it's reputed high portability. Similarly Solaris was very scalable. Partly because in 1996 Sun released the SPARCcenter 2000, which could handle 20 CPU sockets. That was a lot, and I'm guessing not many folks bought one, but they had to deal with it in an official capacity, as time when on more CPUs (and cores) became prevalent Solaris was good to go as that situation became more mainstream. If you develop for the odd ball situations and corner cases, it may force you to be less lazy as a programmer.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- huslage 6y ago
  I ran a fully populated SPARCcenter 2000. It was a beast. Not like the E10K, but still a beast.
- bcantrill 6y ago
  You are absolutely correct; anyone who worked on Solaris scalability and performance back in the day will have plenty of Dragon war stories -- and Solaris did so well on Campfire (a.k.a. UltraSPARC Enterprise 4000, shipped 1996) exactly because so much time and energy had been spent on Dragon (a.k.a. SPARCcenter 2000, shipped 1992).
  - throw0101a 6y ago
    > Campfire (a.k.a. UltraSPARC Enterprise 4000, shipped 1996) My main gripe with the various 'E-series' systems (IIRC, we had some E3x00s) was boot-up time, especially the RAM check on power up. I was in an academic environment, and so every so often we had to power down our lab for electrical/fire code inspection power outages by Facilities. The first time we rebooted one (with 4GB of RAM?) it kept booting and booting and booting and booting and booting and booting. 17 minutes later we got the login prompt on the console. We put the 17 minutes as a note in our run book so that we knew not to worry if took 'forever' and to move onto the next step. Otherwise we'd start freaking out about something being "broken" with the system(s). (This was in the 2001-2001 timeframe.)

082349872349872 6y ago

Does OpenVMS still support logging out via 'DISCODUCK'? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynWhozyOoZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynWhozyOoZQ

malux85 6y ago
Please, I hope this is a thing. If not, I'll code the implementation.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Looks like it ought to still be a thing: http://h30266.www3.hpe.com/odl/vax/opsys/vmsos73/vmsos73/6489/6489pro_005.html http://h30266.www3.hpe.com/odl/vax/opsys/vmsos73/vmsos73/648... > "You can abbreviate a command as long as the abbreviated name remains unique among the defined commands on a system. DCL looks only at the first four characters for uniqueness." and since max command line length seems to be a few K, the masochistic could try instead: $ DISCIPLINEOFPROGRAMMING (are there any other 1976 things in the equivalence set of DISCONNECT?)
  - unixhero 6y ago
    What is this thing? What is this for?
    - geraldcombs 6y ago
      DCL is VMS's command line interface. Commands start with full-on verbs (set, copy, define, print, ...). You can use partial strings in commands as long as they are unique (e.g. "set def" instead of "set default"). Imagine being able to type "pyth" at a bash prompt and it running python. What I think the previous posts are referring to (and which I don't remember from my DCL days) is that apparently DCL only checks the first four characters for uniqueness, so "disc", "discoduck" and "discgolf" match the "disconnect" command.
unixhero 6y ago
Skinny hot girls, what's not to like.

non-entity 6y ago

From my understanding there used to be a OpenVMS hobbyist license available for people to use. However the parent company seems to be abandoning it and I had trouble discerning if there was going to be some sort of replacement for it at the time I read about it. Does anyone have any better info about this?

vladvasiliu 6y ago
The website has a page about a community license [0]. > VMS Software Inc. is excited to announce the availability of the OpenVMS Community License that allows the OpenVMS community members (hobbyists, non-commercial software developers, and others) to obtain an OpenVMS license free of charge. > OpenVMS x86 licenses will be available later as more stable versions of OpenVMS are released for this architecture. [0] https://vmssoftware.com/about/news/2020-07-28-community-license/ https://vmssoftware.com/about/news/2020-07-28-community-lice...
- non-entity 6y ago
  Ah nice to see they kept something going.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

Will it be faster than in SIMH? Many years ago I tried one of the SIMH VAX simulators on a Windows PC and it was blazingly fast.

fredoralive 6y ago
It's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison, as the last VAX VMS was released in 2001, and stopped getting support in 2012. I think the main target for x86 VMS is people with Itanium (or Alpha) hardware wanting some sort of supported future path.

jabl 6y ago

So VMS has gone full circle in terms of target architecture type. CISC (VAX) -> RISC (Alpha) -> VLIW (IA-64) -> CISC (x86).

doctor_eval 6y ago
So... given what’s happened to most of those architectures, should we take it as a bad omen that it’s been ported to x86?
- als0 6y ago
  Yes!
- boring_twenties 6y ago
  Sounds like a great omen to me.
- doctor_eval 6y ago
  Well yes I should have said “a bad omen for x86”. I’ve never been a fan of the ISA but then the last time I tried it was 8086... Let’s just hope they don’t port OpenVMS to ARM and RISC-V :)

unixhero 6y ago

Is a hobbyist license generally available? What are the facts? Price? How do I get it?

voxadam 6y ago
HPE announced the end of the hobbyist program. IIRC the licenses expire at the end of 2021.
- unixhero 6y ago
  Sad What a pointless decision. How else shall people learn anything about the system, besides work exposure.
  - icedchai 6y ago
    Anyone who wants to experiment with VMS still can. Right or wrong, old OpenVMS releases may as well be free, for anyone who can do a google search.
privong 6y ago
This comment has info about a community license: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24166978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24166978

chmaynard 6y ago

Interesting that their FAQ doesn't mention that VMS source code is proprietary. The name 'OpenVMS' is ambiguous to say the least. https://vmssoftware.com/about/faq/ https://vmssoftware.com/about/faq/ The Wikipedia article about OpenVMS clarifies this in the second paragraph. My point is that the OpenVMS FAQ should address this question because it keeps coming up.

paulsutter 6y ago
VMS was renamed OpenVMS in 1991[1] The term “Open Source” was coined in 1998 by a group of people in the free software movement[2] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source-software_movement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source-software_movemen...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- chmaynard 6y ago
  Hence the ambiguity.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    Well, it's the Open Source that is ambiguous then, as it came later as a term... (which, co-incidentally, is one argument of the free/libre software guys too)
- chasil 6y ago
  Somewhat prior to then renaming, the "Open Software Foundation" was formed by a consortium including IBM, HP, and DEC. This was done because of an uncomfortably close embrace between Sun Solaris and AT&T System V Release 4. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation UNIX on DEC Alpha was originally named OSF/1.
pjmlp 6y ago

tyingq 6y ago

You can still occasionally find a Vaxstation 3000 for under $300 on eBay, if you're interested in being a purist.

icedchai 6y ago
I'm running an AlphaServer DS10L here! It cost me about $275. It feels pretty quick for a ~20 year old machine.
- tyingq 6y ago
  You got a good deal there. All the Alphas I see for sale are $1k+.
  - icedchai 6y ago
    This was about a year ago when I bought it. Finding a relatively cheap one did take a couple of months. There is a DS10L on there for above $500 right now: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Compaq-AlphaServer-DS10L-DH-71AAA-AA/224031641936 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Compaq-AlphaServer-DS10L-DH-71AAA-A... No indication of the exact model, or what it has for RAM or HDs. I would only buy ones that had a screen shot of the console output, since then you have some confidence that it actually boots.
    - tyingq 6y ago
      I've noticed a lot of that buying old computers on eBay. No listing of basic info like CPU speed, installed ram, cards, etc.
      - icedchai 6y ago
        It kind of makes sense. A lot of people have this stuff sitting around for 20+ years and just want to get rid of it. Connecting a serial console cable to a headless rack mount server might be a lost art.
rst 6y ago

aap_ 6y ago

My (not quite serious) hope is that this will kill x86. After all every other architecture it ever supported died a mysterious death.