OpenVMS on x86
vmssoftware.com
vmssoftware.com
After learning about the OpenVMS community license I got excited and applied for a license. Bought myself a [PiDP-11](https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11) and got ready to party.
OpenVMS got back to me, asking me to clarify just why I wanted this software. I has already explained my background and intent. They said it was insufficient justification and pointed me to a (windows based) student package :( Very discouraging.
I just can't understand why they would make this ancient OS so inaccessible. It is genuinely great stuff, and with an active community it would probably re-emerge as a legitimate contender.
So, all that being said, I followed the link and read the FAQ, and found this: >"You can participate in the field test if you are a customer or partner of VSI with a valid support contract."
What gives, VSI. what the heck even gives?!
The OS is used by a limited and probably dwindling number of vendors of specialized, complex and long-lived software originally developed for VAX/VMS. I was tangentially related to users of such software for a while; the vendor made the VAX->Alpha and Alpha->Itanium transitions, but saw the writing on the wall and ported the software away from VMS. VSI is not a large outfit, and they're a business. They don't need the hassle of dealing with hobbyists.
It is genuinely great stuff, and with an active community it would probably re-emerge as a legitimate contender.
It's a fascinating and superbly documented system, agreed. But a contender? Far too late for that, IMO, if it was ever in the cards (I don't think so.)
There are many older VMS installations where this cannot be fixed, and more still where it is not worth the trouble of engaging a support contract to obtain the patches.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/06/openvms_vulnerabili...
VSI plans to add the x86 version to the free community license program [1] at a later date.
In the mean time, the Alpha version runs very well under emulation, and is available both under the CLP (free, registration required[1]; also includes Itanium, though AFAIK no emulators capable of running it exist), and as a freely downloadable (no registration required), preinstalled student kit bundled with a preconfigured Windows emulator[2].
Note that the "student" license is unrestricted for non-commercial use; you don't have to be an actual student to use it.
[1] https://vmssoftware.com/community/community-license/ (note "x86 (planned)")
I do own a real Alpha system and pointed this fact out in my request, so maybe that helped?
They did initially suggest the student package to me as well, but after replying that I had prior VMS experience and would prefer to install and configure the system myself, they promptly issued my licenses.
Because it's the easier option for people who just want to try it out or don't want to invest time (which seams to be the case with you).
They literally wrote:
quote:
"we understand that not everyone has a windows machine (studentpackage), if you still want/need a community license (alpha iso) please answer....."
One day later got my alpha OpenVMS key
EDIT: And when someone from VMSSOFTWARE reads this: Thank you!! It's still part of HNET/BITNET ;)
EDIT2: If someone want's to try out openvms like sdf.org:
I think getting your hands on the most recent versions – such as the latest z/OS 2.5 – is a lot harder, unless you work for IBM or an IBM customer, or you know someone who does (and who is willing to help you out, an action which may involve some risk for them). In recent years IBM has added hurdles to make unauthorised distribution harder (such as encrypting the ADCD distributions), although those hurdles are not insurmountable, they just add more work (usual story with DRM). And I think you'll find Hercules will barf on the latest versions of z/OS anyway.
If you want to latest versions from IBM totally legitimately – IBM will sell you a development environment (zPDT) for US$5,540 a year. If you need it for work, could be a totally reasonable investment. If you are just doing it to muck around – well, that's an expensive hobby, although certainly there are people out there who spend more than US$5,000 a year on their hobby, and many people here earn enough they can afford it – but you'd have to really enjoy it for it to be worth it. I doubt there are many people out there who enjoy z/OS that much – although there is one retired IBM guy in Orkney, Scotland (Colin Paice), who does, and he's actually blogged about how he forked the money out and bought it [1].
[0] I think it is better not to say where publicly, in part because doing so draws attention to those places and attention might result in IBM issuing takedown notices. If you know the right search terms it is easy to find.
[1] https://colinpaice.blog/2020/06/29/getting-z-os-installed-on...
One thing I noticed – IBM does not want individual consumers as customers, only enterprises. If you say they live in the US, the order form says "IBM products are only available for commercial, academic, public, research, or other organizational use", and asks you for an organisation name. I am in Australia, so I give my country of Australia and home address, it then asks me to certify I am buying it for a business, and won't let the order process continue unless I tick it. For Australian orders, it also asks for an Australian Business Number (ABN), which you get from the government when you register a business with them. (Government agencies, and educational/religious/charitable/nonprofit/etc institutions, and trusts, are also eligible for them.) I guess the US equivalent would be an IRS EIN, or a DUNS number, but the US order form doesn't ask for one, just an organisation name.
Anyone in Australia, can get an ABN, but you have to tell the government you are running a business, and in theory they can revoke it if you aren't a real business (and occasionally they actually have). However, another way to get an ABN – anyone can incorporate a company, and when you do you get an Australian Company Number (ACN), and anyone with an ACN is automatically entitled to an ABN (the ABN is just the ACN with a couple of checksum digits prefixed). I actually own a company, which does nothing and has never done anything – one day I was daydreaming about starting my own business, so I created a corporation, and then I daydreamed a bit more, and then I parked the idea – but I pay US$200 a year to the government to keep my corporation alive, so I have a legitimate ABN to give them through that. There is no legal requirement for a corporation to do anything, a "shelf corporation" which stays forever dormant and just pays the annual fees (and engages in a few other pro forma annual legal rituals) is legally just as valid as a billion dollar company
If I gave them my credit card number, and let them charge all that $$$ to it – I expect they'd process the order. How are they supposed to know that my "business", despite being a real legal corporation, is actually just a "fantasy daydream business" not a real one? I don't see how they could tell. (I mean, I could be an independent contractor/consultant/freelancer working through that corporation, rather than a full-time employee – and maybe one day I shall be.) They could cancel the order and give me the $$$ back instead of fulfilling it, but I'd be surprised if they did that.
Indeed, ex-IBM employee Colin Paice in Scotland reports successfully buying it from them – https://colinpaice.blog/2020/06/29/getting-z-os-installed-on... – I guess one thing that may help – don't say it is for a hobby or personal use, claim it is for a business (which if you think about it, doesn't even have to be a lie – tell yourself a story about how you are going to use this to develop software to sell people, and if you believe your own story, that makes it true – who knows, believing in it might even make it happen – and if it doesn't ever actually happen, well a lot of businesses fail, often even just as they are getting started...)
He's commenting on the joke that OpenVMS kills its host architectures, so x86 must be dying...
After the Alpha was canceled, the local shop gave up on VMS, ported everything to Linux and IBM AIX, and moved on. Seems like a wise move.
VMS has been dying for decades. I suspect any serious business has ported their app to another platform.
I know a lot of people in the OpenVMS hobbyist community were dead set against people doing that, and I do understand why – one of the big reasons was they were worried that it might give the hobbyist community a bad name inside DEC/Compaq/HP(E), which in turn might lead to the hobbyist program being discontinued.
But, when it comes to OpenVMS on VAX – there is no alternative, I really doubt anyone who currently works for HPE cares one iota, and I'm not sure why VSI should be upset about it either? So maybe that former logic is no longer applicable.
Different story for Alpha and Itanium (and soon to be x86), for which there is a hobbyist program run by VSI, and the same concern (that hobbyists hacking license restrictions might upset the vendor to the point that they cancel the hobbyist program) applies to VSI as well.
(I suppose one possible reason VSI might get upset with breaking licensing restrictions on VAX, is that any technical workaround for VAX licensing might also work on newer platforms – but I don't know if that is actually true, and even if it were, VSI could easily make it false by moving to an incompatible licensing system for their OpenVMS releases.)
There are probably free Alpha emulators by now, but the VAX version has been running on PCs for a long, long time, and it's what people know.
Maybe Cutler would have stayed in that early fait-accomplis. They also never would have spent the money on Alpha, or wasted time selling MIPS workstations.
(I own both VAX and Alpha hardware and run VMS on both)
Lucky you!
Putting that aside, I think a VAX release is also technically much more challenging than Alpha/Itanium was. From what I've heard, the VAX release used different (older) build tools, etc, and even if HPE or VSI still has the source, it would be quite an effort to work out even how to compile it all. By contrast, HPE was still building new Alpha/Itanium versions internally at the time it started to transition to VSI, so it was just transitioning a currently active process to another organisation, as opposed to resurrecting something which hadn't been actively done in many years.
And naturally BLISS as well.
Our lecturer waxed lyrical about the future of computing while we struggled with debugging on the flickery vt100 terminals in the late eighties.
Proprietary operating systems which added POSIX/Unix compatibility frequently used "Open" as branding, either for that compatibility support or for the OS overall. As well as DEC/Compaq/HP(E)/VSI OpenVMS, there is also OpenEdition, which is the IBM's original name for the Unix compatibility component of their MVS mainframe operating system–MVS was later renamed OS/390 and now z/OS (although to be pedantic about it, OS/390 and z/OS refer to the operating system as a whole, officially MVS is just certain of its core components, and as such MVS still exists today as part of z/OS), while OpenEdition was renamed to Unix System Services (sometimes abbreviated to USS, even by IBM, although purists object to that, since USS was already in use as the abbreviation for the Unformatted System Services component of IBM's VTAM mainframe networking package.) Due to this Unix compatibility component, z/OS is actually a certified Unix (UNIX 95). It is also somewhat more than just a compatibility component, in that many newer OS services require it to run – basically anything written in Java, or anything which is shared code with non-mainframe IBM platforms, runs under it. A lot of the systems management frameworks in newer z/OS releases can't run without it.
There is also a POSIX compatibility component of IBM's VM/CMS operating system (now known as z/VM) - originally called OpenEdition too, later renamed to OpenExtensions. OpenEdition/VM was always significantly more limited than OpenEdition/MVS, in part because Unix APIs were technically more challenging to implement under VM/CMS than under MVS (since native VM/CMS is further away from Unix than native MVS is), in part because less was invested due to less market demand at the time (and very little remaining today). OpenExtensions is basically in deep maintenance mode, IBM still supports it but have publicly said they have no plans to add new features; OpenEdition is in somewhat of a shallower maintenance mode – they aren't interested in updating it from UNIX 95 to a newer UNIX standards release (UNIX 98 or UNIX 03 or UNIX V7), but given they actively use it to provide higher level OS functions (such as Java support), inevitably some enhancements sometimes get made to support new requirements in those areas. Generally, for anything more demanding, IBM will recommend using z/Linux (Linux on the mainframe), or zCX (a port of Docker to z/OS, wherein z/Linux is run under a hypervisor which is built in to the z/OS operating system.)
Similarly, when Siemens added POSIX compatibility to their BS2000 mainframe operating system (mainly used in Germany), they renamed it to BS2000/OSD (OSD = Open Server Dimension). BS2000 is still around, although Siemens ended up selling it to Fujitsu.
Fujitsu owns at least three different mainframe lines – as well as BS2000, they also bought the British firm ICL who owned the VME mainframe platform, and they have also have a "clone" of IBM MVS, MSP. The "clone" is not really a clean clone, they actually stole a lot of IBM's code to build it. IBM sued them (and Hitachi too who were doing the same thing), and the lawsuit settlement included a license from IBM for them to legally continue doing it (for which Fujitsu and Hitachi paid IBM several hundred million dollars each). MSP is less than 100% compatible with MVS, and only with old 1980s/1990s vintage 31-bit MVS. I believe it currently only survives in Japan, although it used to be popular in some other countries too, in particular Australia. A lot of Amdahl machines ran Fujitsu MSP, and then Fujitsu bought Amdahl. But, back to the topic of Open – when ICL added a POSIX compatibility subsystem to VME, they renamed it to OpenVME. And OpenVME is still around too; its major remaining use is inside the UK government, which has various core systems trapped on it.