Some Life Lessons from VAX/VMS (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Some Life Lessons from VAX/VMS (2013)

davewentzel.com

29 pointsTMWNN8 comments

When you don't know the shutdown command because you don't ever need it :)

Let's not talk about kernel mode AST development at 3am on a 500 user VAX-11/780 that you can preload the typeahead buffer on your VT100 with like 45 minutes of typing.

Heh, I’ve recently toyed with running a VAX in SIMH in a Docker container and installing NetBSD on it.

I've done exactly this, it's quite fun:) There is a slight quirk where you want a different config for the initial install vs running for real, but I just map a different config file into the container (plus the install disk) for the first run and then switch to mapping in the real config after that.

As a side note, OpenVMS is still developed and sold, just not from HPE, but from VMS Software Inc.

I’m really happy to see that OpenVMS survived DEC->Compaq->HP->HPE and even runs on x86-64 now.

> Funny story. I learned a lot of life lessons from VMS.

I did too, but the lessons have nothing to do with the incredible platform. There is this fictitious scene in "The Pirates of Silicon Valley" where young Billy boasts that it doesn't matter if DOS is NOT better than Mac. That's the lesson I learned IRL as some kid who grew up in the shadow of the USSR carrying around Andy Tanenbaum's "Dinosaur" book (featuring MINIX) and downloading free "layered applications" and utilities for it from some socialist ahole (with tenure at MIT) over the Internet, filled a vacuum created by all the cash being sucked out of Technology by the dot-com crash..just about the exact same time that a now exposed group of losers in Santa Clara allegedly stole the plans to DEC's Alpha chip, enabling them to breath incredible life into the then very dead architecture that is only now being eclipsed by ARM. (Ironically, the settlement with DEC involved the Santa Clara losers having to buy DEC's Hudson FAB that included StrongARM --bit the Santa Clara losers were such big idiots they first spun that off into a subsidiary and then sold the subsidiary, only to have it all come back and kick their arse here in 2025). No, you can't make this stuff up and I'm sorry if they don't teach it in the circular referencing blogger sphere.

When you fail, fail big. (But not too big). This is a good one.

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