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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

i used VMS in the very early 80s, when i was working at a college which was part of the university of london. i never cottoned on to it - that versioning file system (obviously designed to sell hard disks) and all that SYS$SYSTEM stuff (i mean - why?).

and then i changed jobs somewhere else, using a dec-10, and discovered what a really horrible OS was like.

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I used VMS in the late 70s and early 80s. I started using Unix too, in the late 80s. What was wonderful about VMS at that time, relative to Unix, was that DEC sold a large set of books, the "pumpkin books", which explained everything you needed to know to do just about anything with the systems (there was also an "internals" book). In contrast, at that time, if you wanted to learn to do something difficult in Unix, you essentially had to go find a Grey Beard to tell you how to do it. The internet and Linux changed all that of course, but before that happened learning VMS was a joy and learning Unix was a pain.

you should have seen the stack of manuals we got with our IBM 4381s - needed a whole room to store them in. and they were great.

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.

Unix has always had comprehensive online manuals since the very earliest days. As a kid I was told how to ls and cd and use man and apropos and that was all I needed.

I had the exact opposite reaction. I grew up on UNIX. BSD, Solaris, HP-UX, then later Linux; though always as a user. The first time I ran into VMS, I fell in love. It was just such a different experience. Granted that OpenVMS has been trapped in a bubble, and that using even the latest versions, feels like you've been teleported back to 1990. I'll be really interested to see, now that the platform is much more accessible, if they can build a community of users again.

> It was just such a different experience.

yes, but a better one???

having said that, there has always been a huge soft spot in my heart for IBM VM/CMS.

I would be surprised if they do to be honest. What possible niche could it fill that a community ...a viable community... could be based on?

It has a versioning filesystem, i heard that security is better, can run POSIX programs (X was at some time available) , so why not ?

I feel your pain. Used to run IT at Birkbeck College and they were huge on VMS. IIRC the University of London library system at the time, Libertas, depended on VAX. As a UNIX person it was wild. But credit where it is due: that thing was bulletproof.

well, the vax was certainly a big upgrade from what we had before - a modular one. which frankly was a bit bizzare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Technology_Limited

this was at queen elizabeth college, off high street kensington. the place i moved to with a dec-10 was middlesex poly.

> that thing was bulletproof.

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.

"Survival of New Orleans Blog" by Michael Barnett (Interdictor) [0] on LiveJournal

“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...

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