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>