People Still Use VMS!?
I’ve talked about cutting my "Internet teeth" on VMS a few times, but never really used (or saw) the OS much past my early days in college. Imagine my surprise when I received this email from Arthur Cochrane the other day:
I have a 64 OS on my desktop that I have had for years. It doesn’t crash and has been available for many years (at least 15). It has been doing clustering for over 20 years. What is it? Why VMS!!! It just runs. I do VMS system admin for CSX (one of the two tier 1 railroads east of the Mississippi). You would not believe the amount of computer power it takes to run a railroad. You think railroads are old technology from watching the old westerns with the steam locomotives but the modern railroad is very big into technology.
Wireless computers and GPS on the engines and each railcar has a tag that can be read when the train goes by a reader on the side of the track. There are over 300 readers east of the Mississippi. The system I do admin on is where the track side readers send their data via dial-up. If the system is down over thirty minutes trains stop moving as the location and cars in a train have to be known so rail yards can break up and make new trains. The system has to be up 7/24/365.
We can also affect commuter traffic in the DC area as they share the rails with freight trains. We have a maintenance window on Sundays from 00:45-02:00 if we have to have it. We have a lot of Unix (Sun, AIX, and Red Hat) systems also. I am getting into Linux now (I got Technician certification for REHL 4 and RHEL5). In my little cube I have a VMS desktop system, PC with XP, and a PC with CentOS 5. The XP and CentOS system have Synergy to share the keyboard and mouse of the windows PC. We also do remote admin of systems in Albany, NY and Indianapolis. Since we are in Florida we have a disaster recovery site with IBM in Maryland and do a DR test each year. If a storm gets close we send a small team just in case communications is lost at the data center. The raised floor at the data center is build for a cat 4 storm. In Florida you pay attention to the weather in hurricane season!
I am 51 years old and have been doing VMS admin since 1988 and computer since the 6800 and 8085 micros. Google “Arthur Cochrane” .AND. DECUS to look for DECUS talks I have given and google “F. Arthur Cochrane” for the Micromon article for the 6502 micro back in 1982. My first home PC was a PET 4030 with dual 5.25 floppy drive in 1981. We used PETs at work to communicate over the IEEE 488 bus to $10,000 HP oscilloscopes! My first PC was a Pentium 90 with a 14.4 modem for getting on the Internet in 1992. At work I as used a MAC IIci with dual screens.</blockquote>
7 Comments
Alfred Thompson
October 2nd, 2007
at 10:15pm
OK I am surprised that you are surprised. If you want a system up 24/7/365 what else are you going to run?
But then I am surprised that people still use Linux/Unix which was never ever as good as VMS. But then 14 years at DEC would bias me a little. :-) Oh and I do have an account on a VMS system to this day.
Chopin Cusachs
October 4th, 2007
at 6:05am
Used several models of VAX with VMS versions from 2 through 4
and loved the software and hardware. Only time I had a system
crash was when I was debugging new hardware that had a
glitch in how long a signal line was held down.
It was fun watching the hardware evolve from the 11/780 with
several big cabinets to a little desktop box that could almost
have passed for a PC on casual glance.
Choppy
Tony Rich
October 4th, 2007
at 7:14am
I can believe it! DEC had some very powerful desktop 32 bit systems
in the 80’s. Howvever their marketing flopped.
FYI:
Unix has been around just as long as IBM’s mainframe OS MVS
(now termed z/OS in it’s latest iteration) Unix was originally designed
for AT&T’s ESS computers (Electronic Switching System) which replaced
the old electro-mechanical relays.
Jamie N
October 4th, 2007
at 11:40am
I used to work at a very large pharmaceutical company. They have been running a VMS system to monitor production since… well I don’t know when, but it’s running on an *OLD* DEC Alpha server in the corner of the data centre. It’s been there for years and AFAIK it hasn’t been rebooted for over 2 years, and even then it was only shut down because the room’s air conditioning failed!
When I asked the admin why he didn’t upgrade it or something, he just said “Why? It’s working isn’t it?”. Good point. And they do need it to work 24/7/365. You would simply never get that level of uptime on any other system, barring miracles.
Robert Rabbin
October 4th, 2007
at 12:47pm
OpenVMS is now at version 8.3 and runs on intel Itanium2s as well as the just-ended Alpha series. Just recompile and you are on new equipment. It never died, just the hardware did… as if you are still running Windows 3.1 on a 386 and it does anything useful? It has evolved, just some people forgot becuase it is not usually on the desktop. Each computer has its place and the place for a real 24×7 machine is not gone or even replaced. When it comes to real-time activity or multiple users and security (it IS un-hackable when set up right), there is really nothing like OpenVMS and those who use it know that. Unfortunately, there is no advertising or even articles in the magazines about it (or used in the colleges as much any more) so only those over 40 know about it. HP doesn’t care because it is a cash cow, but the good thing is that they are keeping it up to date, for sure.
Ross
October 4th, 2007
at 3:21pm
$purge/keep=2
Now why can’t any of these ‘real’ os’s do this. Saved my bacon more than once. but then, them unix folks never make mistakes.
Sharon
October 5th, 2007
at 12:35pm
VMS is the best operating system around, I wish more people were familiar with it these days. I manage Unix and Windows servers, but they just can’t compare. VMS is secure, great to manage, and the reliability is fantastic. We are finally getting ready to pull the plug on an old Alpha server we brought up in 1996, with a /233 processor. For years it carried sizable databases, eight web sites, dozens of telnet users and a messaging system that kept in contact with over 10,000 users by email. Our VMS machine never gave us a problem. I work for a University and we support multiple campuses. If I had a choice, I would still be doing it on VMS.