OpenVMS 9.2 for x86 is finally available for hobbyists
raymii.org
raymii.org
Can't wait to try this out later this week, I haven't used VMS in years, and never had to install it... gonna be interesting.
and then i changed jobs somewhere else, using a dec-10, and discovered what a really horrible OS was like.
this was at queen elizabeth college, off high street kensington. the place i moved to with a dec-10 was middlesex poly.
I remember back when hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, there was a shop running VMS for (I think) some financial institution that left a skeleton crew onsite to keep things running. They had 3 sites (if I recall) across the US, but for whatever reason they needed all 3 up as long as possible, so those guys manned the generator. They were doing live blog updates, which was pretty wild at the time.
Eventually the site went offline, but the other VMS sites picked up without losing any data.
Sadly, I can't find anything about this company in a few minutes of searching, so my vague memories are all I have. But I thought it was so cool that the other sites seamlessly picked up when the New Orleans site went down.
“We’re on the 10th and 11th floor of a corporate high rise on Poydras Ave., right near St. Charles. We have generators and tons of food and water. It is five of us total. I am not sure how the Internet connection will be affected. I have a camera and my gun. Sustained winds are 175, gusts to 215. The real danger is not the wind, it’s the storm surge the wind will be pushing into the city from the Gulf through the lake. The city might never recover. Honestly, this thing could be biblical”
Starts on August 28th [1]
From Baseline magazine summary [2]:
That online diary, or weblog, entry was posted about noon on Sunday, Aug. 28, by Michael Barnett, a former Green Beret and business consultant to Intercosmos Media Group, the parent company of domain registrar DirectNIC and Zipa.com, a Web host. Barnett, a lifelong friend of Intercosmos chief executive officer Sigmund Solares, was holed up with his girlfriend Crystal Coleman in a data center in New Orleans’ Central Business District, an alleged safe place to ride out Hurricane Katrina. Solares hired Barnett as crisis manager for the storm.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20050917030139/https://interdict...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20060326000654/http://interdicto...
[2] https://www.baselinemag.com/business-intelligence/Diary-of-D...
yes, but a better one???
having said that, there has always been a huge soft spot in my heart for IBM VM/CMS.
as for unix, i learned most from a very cheap book written by mike banahan, which told you everything you reallly needed to know - everything is a file etc.
i actually worked with mike for several years at the instruction set - not always easily:
me: why do i have to work with mike???
my boss: because you are the only person in the company that hasn't tried to strangle him.
i suppose i'm too nice - much the same was said when i was a microbiology technician in edinburgh in the 1970s regarding one of the consultants, about whom i did have serious death-plans.
[1] Before I checked I was under the misunderstanding that AMD64 had just got rid of the extra rings alongside stuff like BCD instructions, so was trying to find a source for that.
Quite nice BASIC and Pascal compilers, and BLISS at least has facilities for proper bounds checking.
https://docs.vmssoftware.com/vsi-openvms-x86-64-v92-installa...
1.2.1. Recommended Settings for Virtual Machines
VSI recommends that your OpenVMS virtual machine be configured with:
Memory Minimum of 6 GB
Minimum Number of CPUs: 2I used VMS on various types of VAXen in the mid 1980s and I liked it because of its systematically designed command line interpreter. A Unix shell is a complete mess compared to that.
I switched to Unix in the late 1980s and to Linux later and found it technically more powerful. Lightweight processes, pipes and many more. Is there anything in OpenVMS that Linux is fundamentally lacking?
File versioning. This is bodged on in all xNixes by embedding version numbers into filenames, then writing a multi-tens-of-thousands-of-lines shell scripts to track all the versions, make loads of symlinks so programs can find them if they don't need specific revisions, occasionally add new versions and remap hundreds of links, occasionally prune old libraries, carefully manage umpteen paths to where different libraries are kept... and this is considered normal and nobody sees anything wrong with it, when in fact it's a vast ugly kludge of a hack, now fossilised as package managers and so on.
All because it's a braindead filesystem.
For system administration I use etckeeper these days. That serves nearly the same purpose. But for programming VMS was superior unless you are disciplined and commit frequently enough.
Sadly, this simplification was, IMHO, a step too far and a bad thing to remove. But Unix's namespace is much simpler, and doesn't really understand and incorporate extensions and things either. Which is a limitation but it makes it much simpler.
The fact that most Unix GUIs, from NeXTstep to KDE, put back in and use file extensions to associate files with applications shows that this is in fact important functionality.
Without extensions, having version numbering doesn't make as much sense.
But a Unix with file extensions and file numbers would be less like Unix than is, say, Plan 9 or Inferno.
An ordinary user app doesn't need to know. A file version control system does, though. Development environments need to know. IDEs and programmers' tools need to know.
Also VMS had their own issues when it came to it's filesystem(s).
OTOH, the point here is that if facilities like this were available, tools like Git -- VCSes -- could be far simpler and easier to use, because a core part of the functionality they add is built into the filesystem.
Disk space is less of an issue now. This is a server OS for big systems. Terabytes are cheap.
All filesystems have issues.
Remember, all software sucks: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/
imply V9.2 does not support AMD CPUs, and that support only comes with V9.2-1. That implies the version released here is Intel only - is that true? If so, why would that be?
"Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement and the payment of any applicable license fee, VSI grants You a non-exclusive, non-transferable revocable license to Use (as defined below) the Software in object code form as provided to you by VSI, solely for Non-commercial purposes."
"Non-commercial means not used for commercial advantage, direct monetary compensation, or indirect monetary compensation."
Just a thought. Personally I am not interested spending my hobby time on closed source. If I want to understand something I want to be able to read the source. Not that I do it every day or even every week. But having the option is valuable.
There is talk of a download area, but how is it accessible?
... That is all.