VAX Users See the Writing on the Wall 463
Snot Locker writes "An informative piece at ComputerWorld talks about how VAX users are anticipating the costly migration to more modern systems. Several noteworthy tidbits, including hints of the port of OpenVMS to Itanium and the tale of VAX systems that have not had a reboot in 6 years!"
Getting Rid of The Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
ComputerWorld confirms: VAX is dying
In all seriousness, the fact that VAX is still around is a testament to how damn well engineered those machines are.
It sounds like they want new VAXs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Uh? VAX? What year is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
VMS had nice points, but it sure wasn't Unix. (Score:3, Insightful)
On the bright side, it had enough other POSIX stuff (file I/O, pthreads, etc.) that the rest of the port was pretty easy.
Logicals are actually kind of cool - a bastard cross between environment variables and symlinks, but you could do some neat things with 'em.
Re:Don't trash them if you don't have to. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's frigging excellent geek Karma...
Let's face it, the only guy getting better Karma than you is the maintainer on the OpenBSD Vax port...
After all, you're just donating endangered hardware, he is actively developping for it...
But, it's not wasted work kids, not as long as we have a VAX emulator!
Re:getting there (Score:2, Insightful)
Come to think of it...did we ever NEED to advance? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, now we've got amazing graphics capabilities, and games that can make real life seem dull and colourless by comparison. But you know, games were just as much fun back then too. Who here never played Zork? Who here never played on a MUD? Okay, okay, probably several of you, but still... Even with all the amazing graphics, it seems like games were more fun back then... so games aren't the reason...
Business? Businesses ran fine on the tools available at the time. It did just enough work to get the job done. Sure, people had to do some extra work here and there, but since there weren't a billion pre-packaged automated features, what work the computer saved them was considered a blessing, rather than a hinderence. So business isn't the reason.
Communication? Bah! We communicated just fine. Email worked, BBSes worked, phones worked, fax lines worked. If we needed to make a call away from home, businesses usually let you use the phone, or make change for the payphone. Unless you were a doctor, there wasn't a single phone call or message you just couldn't stand to go without for 10 whole minutes. So communications wasn't the reason.
Was it for the Entertainment Industry? Sure, computer graphics gave us amazing films like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, but before that time, directors knew how to make us truly -believe- we were seeing a monster in lieu of some puppets and paper mache. Alien had very little in the way of computer graphics. I don't know that Star Wars (ep 4) had any... yet they remain icons of the Sci-Fi film industry to this day. Their CGI counterparts are often lame in comparison. So it wasn't for movies or TV...
Why then, did we really need to advance so far, so fast, in the realm of computers? And why take a good thing like VAX and cash it in, just because it's old?
Re:Upgrade time! (Score:1, Insightful)
Six Years? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Don't trash them if you don't have to. (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting thought...however, it IS nice to read about OS/Hardware that was built and still operates today.....before 'rebooting' was thought of as a common, regular occurance.
Re:It sounds like they want new VAXs... (Score:4, Insightful)
God, no! Unisys did that with their NX line of mainframes. While it offered some advantages, your mainframe was only as stable as the NT 4.0 image beneath it. Not to mention that the process priorities never worked right on that system. All it did was convince Unisys that they didn't have to update the MCP any longer. You could just use NT for REAL stuff. The MCP is just a "legacy" OS that you're emulating, right?
And then they wonder why IBM eats their lunch every time. Blasted &#$%$#. And if any of you Unisys Execs are listening, WHERE'S MY JVM?!
Re:Come to think of it...did we ever NEED to advan (Score:3, Insightful)
To feed an industry that is based on the notion that obosolete hardware is somehow less useful than when it was new. If you and I just bought everything once, they would not be as rich. So we must be enticed to junk still working goods for new ones.
On the bright side, it's a golden age for ebay vultures like myself...Interesting question. (Score:5, Insightful)
(1) People without significant training and heavy motivation could not learn how to use computers in the "good old days". We only had a market of maybe 30% of the population capable of using them. For computers to spread throughout society, this was not good enough.
The computer industry wanted to spread, for financial reasons if nothing else, and so they made the changes needed to make computers easier to learn and use for non-experts.
(2) Marketing. People want pretty things. People can be convinced to upgrade to something "better" by giving them more pretty things. Even if the old, cerebral games were more fun, the new, slicker graphical games took over the world because they were pretty, and because many of them took advantage of people's natural desire to shoot other people. (I have never understood this, personally, but it's the truth).
I have thought many times that older computers are better, mainly because they were more reliable, and sufficiently simple that a reasonably normal person could understand how they worked, and how to fix things if they broke. Today, I doubt that any single person understands everything going on in a contemporary operating system.
Few people seriously want to go back to the old days, when 24x80 terminal screens that cost as much as a used car were all the computing even well-connected people could have at their homes. I have to admit that I'm nostalgic enough to try and find a good used MicroPDP-11 on eBay, just to say I have one. That being said, I'm not sure how much use I would make of it, and all the weird programming restrictions would surely be archaic. But it would still be nice to have an example of computing history, when we all feltl like elites who might somehow wind up changing the world.
D
Re:Come to think of it...did we ever NEED to advan (Score:3, Insightful)
Although I do agree a lot of our so called "progress" in computers have been steps backwards, it's not fair to say there hasn't been a single important step forwards.
It's not easy to explain the VAX world... (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the reasons we had such uptime was that the software update cycle was very slow by modern standards. Every few weeks, Digital would send us a 9-track tape to update one of our products. VMS was generally once a year between major releases. Anything except an OS update could be installed without rebooting.
Before we had all of this object-oriented programming, the concept of memory leakage was much easier to debug. Also, VMS would exercise tight control over system resources -- a runaway process might cause a slowdown, but processes were limited in their ability to consume memory and page file space.
When there was a crash (it happened), we would call Digital customer support. They would actually read the crash dump and determine hardware or software, and either dispatch field service or send out a patch to be installed. It cost a fortune, but it sure beat the modern concept of calling tech. support and dealing with a semi-literate script reader.
We had three Vaxes in a cluster, attached to a pair of redundant disk/tape controllers. To this day, I hear people talk about the wonderful world of Windows (or even Linux) clusters on Intel boxes. The problem is that without multiple independent paths to your disk drives and something like the distributed lock manager, there is really no protection against the loss of a CPU or a disk controller. Digital had all of this figured out. It must have been quite an accomplishment, because I have seen mostly poor imitations of VMS clusters since that time.
You're comparing 2 years to 6...? (Score:4, Insightful)
And you really think you can compare the uptime of an X86/Linux box to that of a VAX?
You had a handful of PCs stay up for two years. That's not bad, but one cannot simply extrapolate uptime - it just doesn't work that way. That's like saying "I lived to be 60 - I'm sure I'll live to 180 if I'm careful".
Besides, in general the effective lifespan of a PC isn't much more than five years. Your PCs are in the second half of their useful life; I'm sure the VAX is too, but its lifespan appears to be about 10X that of the PC.
Not flaming, btw - I think PCs are useful for a number of tasks; however, long life and long uptime are not part of the PC genome. Sorry.
Ours have 3 monthes left Tops (Score:3, Insightful)
I _KNEW_ VMS... (Score:5, Insightful)
Very seriously, in the early years Microsoft kept saying that Windows NT was "similar" to VMS. So when we ran into various problems, I would look for Windows NT equivalents to familiar VMS utilities.
They weren't there.
And the five-foot-shelf of well-written, comprehensive, accurate documentation in China Red binders wasn't there.
And the source code on microfiche wasn't there.
I have no doubt that in some core internal details the two systems were similar, but at the level of the ordinary user AND the ordinary system manager, VMS was far more mature. I miss VMS, and I miss Digital.
(I knew Digital... Digital was my friend... and Compaq, I mean HP, you're no Digital.)
Re:I'm curious (Score:3, Insightful)
(2) Their operating system didn't have to be compatible with an ancient OS created when computers had a lot less power. Like current Macs, Vaxen had an emulation layer that allowed PDP-11 programs to be run, but they didn't run a crudely-updated version of the PDP-11 OS.
By dramatic contrast, Microsoft took DOS and built Windows on top of that rickety foundation. Even though Windows was rewritten to create NT, 2000 and XP, there are still traces of the old, obsolete technology, because the new operating systems have to be compatible with the ancient programs. These interactions are difficult to manage and wind up causing significant reliability problems.
(3) The market didn't demand it. Consumers and business owners want more features, not something intangible like more reliability. They have accepted the reliability levels of Windows(tm), and therefore it is obviously not that important to them.
(4) As I have said before, VMS and Unix are sufficiently simple that they can be understood by mere mortals. The addition of a GUI and complex backward compatibility hacks makes this impossible for more modern operating systems.
All these factors make new operating systems - especially Windows, but not exclusively - far less reliable than the mainframe/minicomputer systems of old.
Hope that helps.
D
Modern systems? (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny how those obsolete VAX/VMS systems just keep on going. No crashes or reboots, flawless clustering (remember how the Dutch police moved to a new building with ZERO downtime, just by migrating processes from node to node?), rock-solid security, and tools that let admins manage huge networks of servers and workstations with ease. So-called modern systems, like Unix, are now where VAX/VMS was, what, 10 years ago, 15 years ago in some cases. Sun clusters? A joke! The failure of VAX/VMS is one of DEC's marketing department, not their engineers.
Re:Why migrate away? (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, you can still support VMS (in fact, that's what the company I work for does very well, and for a decent price, but we get to charge a fair amount because we don't have a lot of competition in that area), but time is running out bit by bit, and most companies are looking to move to something that will be supportable for another 10 years minimum at least, and honestly, VMS/VAX is not that.
Re:6 year uptimes... (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong. A local root exploit means any remote exploit becomes a remote root exploit.
Great System (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW -- yes, Y2k had little to no impact on VMS. It was designed to be date "correct" from the beginning. Extremely few Y2k patches for VMS appeared, and they were mostly for applications rather than the OS.
What killed VMS was being tied to the expensive hardware it ran on. When support for a sytem costs you 5-6 figures a year compared to buying a Linux/NT server for $1-$5k brand new, plus the VAX hardware was not compatible with other systems (except for the Alpha perhaps), you had to question it's value in your server room. Don't forget the large power consuption of the older systems as well.
If DEC had been allowed to release VMS for Intel as a product (which DID exist as a prototype within DEC), it might still be a viable choice today. I understood this did not happen due to the agreement between Microsoft and DEC when they partnered to port applications to NT and cross-train personnel for PC support -- a smart move on Microsoft's part, as it would certainly have prevented NT from catching on.
Even now Linux and Microsoft strive to achieve the same level of clustering integration VMS enjoyed almost transparently. Unix/Linux is much more flexible and efficient and cost-effective, but this comes at a trade-off of being more technical to use and with less administrative control. Eventually the "lack of applications" problem will fade away.
Hopefully Linux adoption can return us to those "no Microsoft products in use here" days.
Keith-who-was-a-VMS-product-developer-and-admin
Migrating to Inanium is an "upgrade"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Don't trash them if you don't have to. (Score:3, Insightful)
NetBSD will serve no purpose other than to watch them boot into a shell prompt.
VAX Users, Owners, Managers--whatever... (Score:2, Insightful)
Speaking of dedication, who can feel sorry for VAX owners who have let the whirlwind of the last decade keep them from paying attention to the critical systems and applications that keep their business going? The applications must be critical since someone noticed when the system finally crashed. The applications must be substantial since they have not already been replaced by some GUI/BlahScript solution whipped out in a couple weeks.
Come to think of it, past efforts have probably been attempted to replace the VAX based applications but have failed for any number of reasons. I am sure you know of at least one multi-million YourCurrency development effort that was slated to replace some legacy application that either failed to deliver or was cut before it could be implemented. For the applications that actually do get replaced, if they have just been simply replaced by some point-n-click poorly designed GUI, they seldomly seem "more efficient" than the past application.
The real issue goes much deeper than just one model of computer, like the VAX. For any organization, there might be some critical function busy spinning on some tough solid box sitting softly in some unseen corner or closet. It might be a VAX, but could also be an HP3000 or a 3B2 or maybe even a 486 clone. In a decade or less, it will be one of the sexy new systems we wish we could afford today.