Nice, I had kindof given up on thinking they would open this up, but someone here mentioned a couple weeks ago that VMSI were waiting on compilers or something.
Can't wait to try this out later this week, I haven't used VMS in years, and never had to install it... gonna be interesting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The source of the bit about VMS only using 2 rings on x86 from the Wikipedia article is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8kcfvJ1Iec , which I did skim to check that source for what the differences were (it seems to be around page protection between rings[1], circa 14 minutes in). I assume it gives more information, but I don't have time to watch more of it.
[1] Before I checked I was under the misunderstanding that AMD64 had just got rid of the extra rings alongside stuff like BCD instructions, so was trying to find a source for that.
It's certainly a different take on operating systems... will be interesting to see if there is any interest now that you can spin it up as a VM on your KVM server box. Can't figure out the RAM needed to run it from the notes I have read, however...
1.2.1. Recommended Settings for Virtual Machines
VSI recommends that your OpenVMS virtual machine be configured with:
Memory Minimum of 6 GB
Minimum Number of CPUs: 2
I used VMS on various types of VAXen in the mid 1980s and I liked it because of its systematically designed command line interpreter. A Unix shell is a complete mess compared to that.
I switched to Unix in the late 1980s and to Linux later and found it technically more powerful. Lightweight processes, pipes and many more. Is there anything in OpenVMS that Linux is fundamentally lacking?
> Is there anything in OpenVMS that Linux is fundamentally lacking?
File versioning. This is bodged on in all xNixes by embedding version numbers into filenames, then writing a multi-tens-of-thousands-of-lines shell scripts to track all the versions, make loads of symlinks so programs can find them if they don't need specific revisions, occasionally add new versions and remap hundreds of links, occasionally prune old libraries, carefully manage umpteen paths to where different libraries are kept... and this is considered normal and nobody sees anything wrong with it, when in fact it's a vast ugly kludge of a hack, now fossilised as package managers and so on.
Linux does not have a single filesystem, but many of them. I guess you could create one that implements versioning. As a matter of fact around 2000 I used one (Unix, not Linux). It was a version control system where different file versions appeared under different POSIX paths. I liked it, but it was at least as complicated as git and most developers in our organization did not really understand it a complained when things went wrong.
For system administration I use etckeeper these days. That serves nearly the same purpose. But for programming VMS was superior unless you are disciplined and commit frequently enough.
You could, but no normal Unix app will understand it or be able to use it, since this is one of the things that the Unix creators removed from the more complicated forerunners of Unix to make their smaller, simpler OS.
Sadly, this simplification was, IMHO, a step too far and a bad thing to remove. But Unix's namespace is much simpler, and doesn't really understand and incorporate extensions and things either. Which is a limitation but it makes it much simpler.
The fact that most Unix GUIs, from NeXTstep to KDE, put back in and use file extensions to associate files with applications shows that this is in fact important functionality.
Without extensions, having version numbering doesn't make as much sense.
But a Unix with file extensions and file numbers would be less like Unix than is, say, Plan 9 or Inferno.
An application does not need to understand that the filesystem keeps a copy of the previous version of a file. Also in VMS if you use a file without version number it defaults to the newest one.
I know. I ran clusters of VAX boxes, in production, in the mid-1990s.
An ordinary user app doesn't need to know. A file version control system does, though. Development environments need to know. IDEs and programmers' tools need to know.
OTOH, the point here is that if facilities like this were available, tools like Git -- VCSes -- could be far simpler and easier to use, because a core part of the functionality they add is built into the filesystem.
Disk space is less of an issue now. This is a server OS for big systems. Terabytes are cheap.
For what it's worth, when I boot my x86 VMS VM, it seems to only be using a few hundred megabytes of RAM. I believe I have read that they are still using unoptimized binaries as well, so I suspect memory usage may decrease in later releases.
This would be good if it was Free Software. I just don't see any reason to give this long-obsolete and moribund system any mindshare if I'm just sharecropping for some company as a beta tester. It's the same reason I avoid Mac OS and Windows and the rest - no need to use proprietary software when the Free stuff is as good or (for my purposes) better.
imply V9.2 does not support AMD CPUs, and that support only comes with V9.2-1. That implies the version released here is Intel only - is that true? If so, why would that be?
"Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement and the payment of any applicable license fee, VSI grants You a non-exclusive, non-transferable revocable license to Use (as defined below) the Software in object code form as provided to you by VSI, solely for Non-commercial purposes."
"Non-commercial means not used for commercial advantage, direct monetary compensation, or indirect monetary compensation."
Not for "indirect monetary compensation" is vague, and worth looking at closely. Say you run curious-os.blog and take patreon or some other monetary payment, and you write a post based on your experience running this OS. Are the lawyers going to come after you?
Indirect monetary compensation. So if you become an expert in OpenVMS and later take a job to earn money using your expertise you violated the license?
Just a thought. Personally I am not interested spending my hobby time on closed source. If I want to understand something I want to be able to read the source. Not that I do it every day or even every week. But having the option is valuable.
You dont, yet I think. I registered for a hobbyist account and requested Alpha, hopefully that will lead to me getting access to the Portal to request AMD64
Can't wait to try this out later this week, I haven't used VMS in years, and never had to install it... gonna be interesting.