
OpenVMS: state of the x86 port - lelf
http://vmssoftware.com/updates_port.html
======
ncmncm
I just hope they are doing drivers only for devices found in mainstream VMs.
It would be a fool's errand to try to keep drivers up to date with real
hardware. There is no practical benefit to anyone to run VMS outside a VM, but
there are still important VMS applications that would run perfectly happily
and reliably on maintained equipment in VMs forever.

IBM's AS/400 system (now called i series?) was designed for that from the
start. There never was an AS/400 machine, it was always emulated. Programs
started in the '80s are still running, migrated from one physical host
generation to the next without ever being shut down.

~~~
malux85
Which VM software will allow you to migrate a running VM to another physical
host without shutting down? That’s sounds awesome

~~~
snuxoll
Any of the ones frequently used for server virtualization? Live migration is a
standard and pretty important feature.

------
stunthamsterio
I'm genuinely looking forward to this. I used VMS back in the 90's and loved
it as an OS. Clustering, versioned file systems, reasonably well formed error
messages; it seemed very civilised.

It'd be nice to be able to run it in a VM and see how much I've forgotten.
I've got an old workstation in my loft, but haven't really got the room to
have it setup.

~~~
CaptainZapp
HELP is your friend.

The VMS help system, while far less verbose than Unix man pages was, thanks to
its hierarchical organisation really, well, helpful.

~~~
dekhn
the VMS HELP system was my introduction to "learn a system by using depth-
first HELP". I also recall eventually coming across the page which explained
dynamic linking (I couldn't even link hello world with my 2 block disk quota).

~~~
CaptainZapp
Same here.

My basic introduction was that my boss sat me in front of a VT220 terminal and
told me about the HELP command.

Later I discovered the absolute awesomeness that was VMS (at that time,
OpenVMS came later) documentation.

For me and to this day it's the benchmark how documentation should be written
an organized.

------
tapland
Yay!

I hammer at OpenVMS for 40+ hours/week and this is exciting!

We hit 99.99% uptime with new software features being installed being the
reason for the downtime we've had (except for one instance a bunch of years
ago, but at that time I would have been in middle school. I do worry about a
slowly increasing reaction time to user actions though.

Running on X86 we wouldn't have to worry about the future.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
> I hammer at OpenVMS for 40+ hours/week and this is exciting!

What's your work like? Or perhaps I should say, what kind of company do you
work at to use it?

~~~
tapland
We store the critical customer data (their personal info, what they are paying
us for and their settings), build the interfaces for customer service, apis
for s that are used on customer web/apps and logic for what is to happen for
each call. I'm a dev but including our devs, database and hardware people we
are less than 0.05% of the company employees.

I'm the youngest and almost everyone is 2x+ my age. We've lost 40% of the team
to retirements since I joined two years ago.

It's a tight team but communication is oh so inefficient whenever someone is
working remote and between our two locations.

We have other services now that we make calls to to get for example mail and
email sent to customers, but now and then I still see customers receiving
plain text email from the production machine D:

~~~
mariuolo
How good is this for your CV? Do you see yourself working with this tech for
the next 20+ years?

~~~
tapland
I have no idea how good it is. Probably not very, but it's a decent paying job
where I live, upper levels of what devs make.

I studied business and management. Maybe that will be a pro for a new role if
they shut down the VMS.

------
retrocryptid
A couple years ago I set up VMS on a VAX emulator on Raspbian. In case you're
interested, here's the link describing the process:

[http://www.wherry.com/gadgets/retrocomputing/vax-
simh.html](http://www.wherry.com/gadgets/retrocomputing/vax-simh.html)

And I guess the process of requesting and installing a license changes from
time to time. This page describes a slightly different process for activating
the license which worked for me:

[https://meadhbh.hamrick.rocks/home/technical-
sh-t/installing...](https://meadhbh.hamrick.rocks/home/technical-
sh-t/installing-vms-on-your-raspberrypi)

------
jerzyt
While security is being mentioned as one of the strengths, and I certainly
agree with that, there was a version of VMS in the late 80s which wouldn't let
you create a password if another account already used it. In a small
department it wouldn't take more than 15 minutes to hack into someone's
account.

~~~
ngcc_hk
Wow. That is security measure so stupid never heard before. Really :-)))))

------
dang
Related from 2017:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785504)

2016:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12692775](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12692775)

------
ch_123
A related presentation from a few months ago which goes into some extra
detail:
[http://vmssoftware.com/pdfs/webinars/X86_OpenVMS_V9_0_Update...](http://vmssoftware.com/pdfs/webinars/X86_OpenVMS_V9_0_Update_20190722.pdf)

------
dwheeler
It's cool that this exists. I might even try to port a program to it, for my
own amusement. But I don't see the big draw.

VMS had its pros and cons as compared to Unix/Linux. VMS' help system is
really nice. However, VMS filenames are baroquely complex (yes, automatic
versioning can be nice, but the rest of it was insane). Even at its height,
VMS lost to Unix, and Unix plus Linux are now completely dominant in the areas
VMS once filled and has had decades to fill in missing capabilities. I don't
see what the big draw of VMS would be over Unix/Linux, at least enough to
justify it. The world doesn't need another proprietary operating system,
especially one incompatible with what people have now been doing for decades.

~~~
speleo_engr
I don't think its going to get any design starts, nor is that the intent.
There are companies with rock solid legacy applications that want to continue
to run them on newer hardware. VMS first ran on the VAX (long dead), then
Alpha (dead), and finally Itanium (recently dead). x86 will let these legacy
apps run for a few more decades.

------
LinuxBender
This used to be my favorite OS. I am pleasantly surprised to see it is still
around. The security model at the time was vastly superior to Unix. I
maintained the SMS gateway for a mobile provider on it. OpenVMS on Alpha had
incredible performance and stability compared to the Unix system counterparts
at the time. (comparing rack space real estate that is)

~~~
EricE
Alpha was an amazing platform. Yet another great technology that HP flushed
because they didn't know what to do with it :(

------
vkaku
I'm totally looking forward to this. I got access to the VAX and Alpha kits
from HPE, but I've always wanted to run it natively on x86. :) OpenVMS rocks.

------
aarroyoc
I'm very interested to know why this port is taking so long. Few human
resources? Not a priority? Lots of assembly code?

~~~
skissane
> I'm very interested to know why this port is taking so long. Few human
> resources?

That would be my guess. I don't know how big VMS Software is, but I doubt they
are that big. The market they are addressing is limited in size, and is almost
certain to shrink rather than grow, so it would be difficult to justify a
massive investment in developers.

OTOH, how long did the VAX->Alpha port take? How long did the Alpha->Itanium
port take? How long would have HP taken if they'd decided to commit to an x86
port themselves?

~~~
eej71
re: VAX->Alpha

I don't know when they started it - but it was available to customers late
1994 if memory serves.

The Itanium port was announced Sep 2001? A usable version for customers to
deal with - spring 2005?

~~~
icedchai
Also consider DEC and HP had enormous engineering organizations. And Alpha was
designed as extension of the VAX architecture, so presumably the port was less
complicated. You can still find references to "EVAX", for "Extended VAX" in
some of the headers, along with the EV* CPU model numbers. Itanium I know less
about...

------
altmind
What are the things VMS did the best? How it compares to linux nowadays?

What is behind OpenVMS project - nostalgia or some pragmatic reasons?

~~~
goatinaboat
It’s still unmatched for seamless language interoperability.

vMotion is a sort of crude version of VMS live process migration between
nodes.

The security model is very well thought out, beats rwxrwxrwx and setuid hands
down. Versioning filesystem, and RMS means the filesystem is a simple database
too.

DCL seems weird but all the commands work the same way, take the same
arguments and so on. You can guess with a very high chance of being right. And
if you can’t the help/error message is actually useful.

Rock solid stability. Generally very easy to manage, one sysadmin can do a
lot.

~~~
zvrba
> It’s still unmatched for seamless language interoperability.

I don't know about how it works on VMS, but Microsoft's COM is the only other
attempt of language interop I know of. Recently I implemented a COM server,
added `IDispatch` to its interfaces and suddenly I could control and test it
from Porwershell with no extra effort on my part. Like, magic.

~~~
goatinaboat
I’ve used COM (and before that CORBA) but these operate at a different level
of abstraction. On VMS calling a Pascal function from FORTRAN “just worked”
and then you could pass the return value to a C function or BASIC and it was
fine.

VMS IPC was done via mailboxes, send a message to a person or a program was
the same. Which sounds weird to anyone used to the way Unix does mail, but it
worked very well.

(Yep, VAX BASIC was a serious language used for real, production applications)

------
dfboyd
Isn't the VMS x86 port called "Windows NT"?

~~~
ithkuil
Technically Cutler and his team first targeted Intel i860 (N10) and designed
the NT kernel multi-arch from the ground up.

------
retrocryptid
What serendipity! I was looking at this page last night, looking forward to
2020. Also happy to hear there are at least a few VMS fans here.

------
icedchai
One of the first multi-user systems I worked with ran OpenVMS, so I have a
fondness for it and related nostalgia... DECnet, VAX BASIC, etc. I've run it
at home on Alpha and VAX emulators.

------
unixhero
What will it cost???

~~~
pmlnr
Everything.

Joke aside, I have no idea how VMS will be run on non hard-realtime hardware.

~~~
unixhero
Cool. Do you have any links to real time hardware of the past?

------
mongol
I needed to "get around" on OpenVMS in a previous assignment. Some java
processes executed there and needed my attention from time to time. I never
became good friend with it and never "saw the light". I much prefer Linux.

~~~
dingosity
I think we all prefer what we're most familiar with. VMS hearkens back to an
era before tab completion was common and it still throws me when I have to
type DIR instead of ls.

But... VMS _does_ have some interesting features. Even if you prefer Linux,
it's interesting to compare the two and read about why the VMS designers did
what they did.

------
burnte
I can't even imagine why VMS is relevant in 2019.

~~~
goatinaboat
Linux today can’t do half of what VMS could do in 1999.

~~~
turk73
I don't think it is possible to back up that statement. In 1999, machine
interoperability was not as critical as it is today.

Last time I worked with OpenVMS was 2014 going into 2015. The system in
question was an orders management system for an online pharmacy. It. Was.
Hell. The Alpha-based cluster was being rebooted daily because it would run
out of memory constantly. They would purchase spare parts for their cluster
from a local company that specialized in NOS and recovered boards bought on
eBay. We had some laughs about that!

The code was ancient--some of the earliest comments in the sources dated to
the 1970s. There was no source control, no modern compiler, no debugger, no
anything. We used sockets to communicate to a sort-of SOAP service to get data
out for reporting but it was incredibly, tearfully s-l-o-w.

The UI was terrible. The users of it complained endlessly, and rightly so.
We're talking about a time when most everything out there was built on a HTML
Web-based system for at least a decade already and people were well used to
Web interfaces. And here these poor souls were still using terminal emulators
to connect to a green screen application and had to to have all kinds of odd
work-arounds and policies to get by with all the bugs and strange anomalies.
Did I mention the horrible uptime?

The management kept wanting more, more, more out of the enterpise Java team
but all the technical limitation were on the VMS side. Meanwhile, the syadmin
who ran it was a complete turd of a human being, only trying to keep his job
there lest he be forced into retraining into some actually useful technology.
Worse, he actively campaigned against any technical changes we wished to make
(for fear of losing his fiefdom) and so undermined my team to the point where
management became openly distrustful of us. "Can't trust that new-fangled Java
stuff!" "You mean the actually reliable, high-performance stuff? That stuff?"

The company unbelievably doubled down on this odious mess by purchasing the
source code for the system from the vendor that owned because that vendor
wanted to wash their hands of it and get out from under the hell of supporting
it. When I heard what my company paid for that code I nearly had a breakdown
because it was eye-watering. I could have re-written the thing 5X over and
extracted the data for that kind of coin. If that's the kind of idiocy it
takes to manage a large corporation in America these days then I should be a
CEO because I am far more than qualified! I could show up one day a week and
do less damage. Had I had a free hand at that company I could have done
incredible things, but it was not to be.

Worse still, now that they owned the sources, they thought they could do
something useful with it and hired a contractor who had once sort of worked on
this same trash at another firm. He was charging $250/hr to be there and was
the most obnoxious developer I have ever worked around. He set the bar very
low on personal hygiene, decorum, and general bad behavior around the office.
They had to move him out of the cubes and give him his own room because of so
many complaints about odors and um, noises.

Looking back, it seems like everything related to VMS was these kind of
obnoxious people--I used to hang out with the sysadmins who managed the
clusters at the college I attended and they, too, had that VMS/DEC
obnoxiousness disease. I don't get it, I'll never get it, am happy to be far
away from it. DEC had its day, they failed to adapt and modernize and went
away. You don't see this same nostalgia for Wang Computers and Wang was the
true original in the mini space.

~~~
goatinaboat
This is kind of a weird story bro. Like you’re at a deeply dysfunctional
organisation with management and coworkers that you hate (maybe for good
reason) but your anger is directed towards an OS that even running on junk
hardware is still making your company money with perfect backwards
compatibility over 40 years? Huh.

