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!"
6 years of uptime? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah, the VAX... I miss it. (Score:5, Interesting)
These are rock-solid systems that are trouble-free to the point of being kind of silly... but replacement parts were hard to find even back then. (Their VAX had been purchased in the 80s I think.)
The article mentions a VAX emulator that sounds like a much better option than the one chosen by the school I worked for back in the day: an unbeleivably expensive (nearly million-dollar) migration to an Oracle solution that never did really wind up working. (They have since migrated many of the processes to PAPER for crying out loud.)
--- JRJ
6 year uptimes... (Score:5, Interesting)
About a year ago, we switched data centers, and had to power down our rack of x86 machines running Linux. A couple of them had redundancy in hardware (power supplies, RAID arrays, etc.), but the majority of them, working as a load-balanced web farm, had no redundancy at all.
Out of the rack of machines, nearly all of them had been up for the full two years that they'd been in the data center. Of the few that hadn't been up the entire time, *one* had a power supply die, the others were shut down for hardware upgrades.
Now, a year later, all of the machines are still up and running. I really don't have any doubt that a fair number of them would have achieved 6-year uptimes, had they been left in place long enough.
steve
Binary translation? (Score:3, Interesting)
VEST [uruk.org]
Is there really an "end of the road" when the binary keeps on living in sort of a Matryoshka
doll fashion?
Hedley
VAX replacement? (Score:4, Interesting)
itanium? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Ah, the VAX... I miss it. (Score:3, Interesting)
It also provided a very nice pseudo-shell with a VAX coding toolchain. The best part of it was that the system was simply made up of AIX executables and shared libraries, so we were able to integrate with our existing shell and awk programs.
Not sure who made it, but it was a great program, and is still running to this day which is 8 years since used it. Additionally, the original VAX code was at least 10 years old. So, i figure we'll never be rid of VAX, at least in spirit, as emulators give old code a new life.
Re:6 years of uptime? (Score:1, Interesting)
Nostalgia (Score:3, Interesting)
Vaxen clusters won't die... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ah, the VAX... I miss it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Don't trash them if you don't have to. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Alpha? Alpha is dead (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, whilst it's perfectly possible to migrate from a VAX to OpenVMS on an Alpha it's a bit short sighted to migrate from a old platform to one that's about to enter the same state. The sensible stratagy is for something with a longer lifespan. The Alpha was intended to be that, back in the days of DEC, but Compaq basically folded the Alpha into Intels Itanium chips, which are quite different.
HP talks about supporting Tru64 on Alphaservers up to 2011. I read that to mean that after then, if it breaks, that's it, so you'd better be migrated off it by then [0]. So, given about a year to fully migrate, switching to Alpha would only give you 3 years (1 year to switch to, 3 years, then 1 year to move on). That's not a good proposition, at least to me.
So, the short answear was, yup, Alpha is buried, and the turf goes on top in 5 years.
[0] Granted, that's the possibly just the OS side. It's tricky to get hard details out of HP, short of cornering someone.
VAX/VMS email (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Alpha? Its dead, Jim (Score:2, Interesting)
A previous poster mention emulation on emulation. I've seen it done, and heard of others doing it.
When the PDP-11s were EOLed, we ran RT-11 apps using the RT-11 emulator under the RSX-11m emulator on VAX/VMS.
I've heard of people running IBM 650 apps on an emulator that ran on a 1401 emulator which they ran on OS/360.
[Unvarnished Plug] Port to unix (Score:4, Interesting)
--dave
Re:It must be hard for Windows users to imagine... (Score:2, Interesting)
One of the following is required:
# Windows NT Server 4.0 with Service Pack 4 or later.
# Windows 2000 Server
# Windows 2000 Professional
WinXP is not even considered!
Re:6 years of uptime? (Score:3, Interesting)
How did you migrate, to what system? We have some VAXen where I work and, even though we are as satisfied as every one who has worked with a VAX, they will eventually have to be put to sleep. Everything about migration from VAX interests me.
Reformat it... (Score:3, Interesting)
Vax versus Google (Score:4, Interesting)
(1) A single highly-engineered machine (yeah I know VAX/VMS has clusters, whatever they are).
(2) Redundant cluster of many interchangeable parts.
Google has figured out how to do (2) successfully.
I bet that (2) is harder than it looks. How do you protect against a common mode failure in your system software? Do you run a variety of genetically independent OS's and databases's, or do you run identical software on each machine, leaving you open to monoculture failures?
Digression: It's beautiful how eukaryotic organisms solve this problem by having two independent copies of each gene. But if a gene is broken, it generally does nothing rather than produce a lethal result. And the robustness of individual eukaryotes is not enough for the requirements of computers.
Re:Getting Rid of The Obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
And the fact that DEC, the company that build those VAXen, went tits-up five years ago is a testament to how unprofitable it is to build machines that are engineered so well that they never need to be replaced...
Y2K meant NOTHING to VMS users (Score:5, Interesting)
Story told by our DEC rep (Score:5, Interesting)
DEC sales guy, to military contractor: "You're not our only customer, you know!"
Military contractor: "No, but we're one of the few with tactical nuclear weapons."
Seriously, VMS is/was great. I started working on VMS systems in the early 80s, did my doctoral research on them, and ended up managing a bunch of them for a while, before our department migrated to Un*x. I like to say that VMS is to Un*x as Python is to Perl. One is the ultimate in organization, the other is the ultimate in freedom.
Re:Ah, the VAX... I miss it. (Score:2, Interesting)
Port to Itanium has been out for a while. (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a screenie of VMS booting into an Itanium based cluster from May 30th, 2003.
Cant post it, because the "*"'s from the display trigger lameness filter...
Ironic.
Regression testing is not done yet, so it is only in hands of developers, and some customers for testing, like us.
There is a rumour that they have an AMD port as well...
Re:I _KNEW_ VMS... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Modern systems? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, DEC had a big service (systems integration/consulting/support) business too.
The mistake they made was that the engineers believed that the system was so good there was no need to actively sell it - and the engineers ran the show at DEC. Meanwhile, Sun, SGI, et al, were all about their brands, and that worked great for them. Set the industry back 10 years in the process, tho'.
Re:Modern systems? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, my esteemed employer has a data centre packed with VMS boxes running applications written in VAX Pascal.
Every few years, some bright spark tries to port the whole lot to C++ on Unix, they always fail. Presently some genius is trying to port it to NT... I don't want to name names, but there is a whole book, in stores right now, that chronicles the many expensive disasters that have befallen the company due mostly to this.
Re:Oh man! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:6 years of uptime? (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure I've blown disks, and this is about the third time I've replaced a toasted DLT drive. But I have never had to shut the bloody thing off.
Today, I ripped the plug off the rack powering down the cdrom and DLT. Pulled out the bad drive, swapped in the new, in about 30 seconds.
Still works like a charm.
Makes me wonder what sort of crack the designer of Windows NT was smoking between his DEC and microsoft days.....
Re:Six Years? (Score:5, Interesting)
Dunno about that particular facility, but Hughes Aircraft Company (since swallowed by the abominable Raytheon) had a facility built in the 60's that used multiple diesel generators for long term outages and a mechanically coupled flywheel electrical feed for their critical computer systems. From how my father described it, it was a large electric motor attached to a generator with a 6-foot diameter reinforced concrete flywheel between them. The kinetic energy stored in the flywheel easily maintained consistenet power during brownouts, and gave four or five minutes of power if the power went out completely-- enough time for the diesel generators to start. One of the engineers my father worked with called it "inertial backup power".
Re:Vax versus Google (Score:2, Interesting)
The control program itself had been running for that long, as the box can be patched while it's running, and patches tested and reverted while running.
At the time (about 5 years ago), it was slated for replacement with a PLC5, a much newer box based on the 68000 series processors.
More info on AB's PLCs here:
http://www.ab.com/abjournal/nov2002/featur
Re:It's not easy to explain the VAX world... (Score:3, Interesting)
Heck, some even longer!
I still remember back in high school in about 1984 or 1985, we got a donation of a DEC PDP 8/e processor, 4K of core memory, two big 512K drum drives (that looked like a refrigerator) and scads of DECtape drives, along with some terminals.
Well, reading through the system documentation, the cool thing about this machine was that, while it couldn't run without power, it would start right back up where it left off when power failed.
Turns out the CPU could sense when the power had ended and dump its state into (nonvolatile) core memory as its last gasp. When power came back on, the startup cycle would see the state info, load it, and off things would go again.
We tried it once just to see - ran a BASIC program to continuously print something on the LA21, pulled the plug, and damned if it didn't work.
six year uptime seems kinda small! (Score:4, Interesting)
How I crashed a VAX... (Score:3, Interesting)
With the help of a couple of buddies of mine during our CS assembly class, we poured through the documentation and wrote a memory worm, I.E. from straight out of Core Wars, we wrote "IMP" but for VAX-11 assembly. This is where you have the program make a copy of itself and transfer machine operation to the new copy you just made. This ends up filling all of RAM with a copy of itself, unless you have memory protections in place.
Then to make life a little bit more interesting, after running it under normal user mode with boring results like memory access errors, and running it under the VMS debugger utility to make sure it was doing what we wanted it to do, we fiddled with the processor status bits, including the "reserved" bits, changing the software to kernel mode and a couple of other "undocumented" features. We could run it without any software protection at that point. "Accidentily" we pressed the "Run" command in the debugger, then the system went down almost immediately... or at least nobody could get anything else to work.
Immediately we ran to the sysadmin and told the story to him. He thought we were off our rocker, and didn't believe us that we could shut down the system. After about a 1/2 hour, he decided to do a cold reboot of the VAX, after pulling out the manual for trying to figure out just how to do that. It still wouldn't reboot at that point. Finally, he had to re-install the OS from tape and rebuild the hard-drives from scratch, as if it were a fresh out-of-the-box computer (actually, worse than that). Because he was a pretty clueful sysadmin, he got everybody back up and going in about 2 days (regular tape backups of just about everything). This "club" of ours (we did register with college as a formal club... beer napkin, as the club charter, and all) still claimed "credit" for the mishap, but DEC said we were full of it and couldn't have done it. Since the computer was still under warentee at the time with essentially an unlimited service contract from DEC, it really didn't cost the school anything to deal with the issue, other than the downtime of the computer.
Yeah, we had fun with the VAX. I also loved the games of Pong and Breakout we made with the VT100 terminals (These are ASCII-only terminals). Weird glitches that would form every now and again because of time slices to other users, but otherwise pretty fun games. Not to mention Empire tournaments.
Re:VAX emulators (Score:2, Interesting)
Ah, but what you are forgetting is that this particular simulator (SIMH) is Open Source. If it doesn't run your customizations fast enough, you can "simply" customize SIMH to act accordingly. Remember that with a simulator, you have access to everything! Giving priority to those tasks that you deem worthy is a very feasible course of action.
Re:VAX emulators (Score:4, Interesting)
Way more interesting is the SDS 940 emulator; first machine I ever played with. Discrete transistor and diode logic. My old friend Bob Long had written an assembler and an application for it - half of the 8k word core tank was used for his "calculator", an infinite precision calculator that worked in any base between 2 and 32. When I first typed "9**81" and watched the ASR 33 typing out three rows of numbers, I knew what my career would be right then and there. It had room to store one constant; taking the 81'st root of the result took about two hours, followed by a bell, the bang of the teletype and the number 9.
Bob had an old AM transistor radio tuned to the end of the dial, sitting on top of the M register (a couple of large, heavy cards) and we could hear the calculation's progress. Handled fractional roots, too. Computing in 1969; Them Waz The Dayz.
VAX ROCKS (Score:3, Interesting)
It was huge. It was the size of several washing machines side by side, it its own room, with its own separate air conditioner.
It had 4 MB *yes, MB* of RAM, and served data to about 50 workstations. (Green on black, Wyze terminals, as I recall)
This sucker had a GB of Disk Space. It's RAM was accessible via these dinner-plate sized memory 'cards' that slid into the monster case.
You could swap RAM without powering down the system. You ran a command to remap everything out of that card, and when the command was done, you pulled the card out.
It would identify bad RAM on the fly and then map around those bad spots, while writing to a log file for the sysadmin. It wouldn't skip a beat when this happened, either.
The Digital VAX was a true machine - one that, despite its refridgerator size and ~ X86 286 clas processing power, was to the 386 computers common at the time that I was there much like a VW Microbus is to an 18-wheeler Semi.
The Air Conditioner failed, one time. Eventually, the computer room got too hot and the system crashed. But, when it did so, it remapped all the memory to disk.
When we brought the disk back up, (after getting the A/C fixed by an HVAC) all the processes running at the time of crash came back up! We had to manually kill them!
I heard about the story of its delivery. It was actually fell out of the back of the truck on the open highway at about 60 MPH. The agent took it back to the shop, put a new panel on the side, threw it back on the truck, (raising the tailgate this time) and delivered it about 2 hours late. It ran fine when they hooked it up!
It's simply a degree of engineering lost to today's Windows and *nix raised lusers.
I will always respect that VAX. It was a machine for and from a different era of computing.
Physically abusing VAXen (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember once back in the late 80s when my then employer took part in a local computer show. We used a brand new MicroVAX II (in the Q3 enclosure with wheels) to demo our 'ware on. Myself and an another tech brought the machine to the show, so we made a deal with some cow-orkers in the sales dept. that they would bring it back. Big mistake.
Naturally, my tech friend and I carefully loaded the VAX into a station wagon and drove it to the venue, even though it really wasn't far, all the while going carefully over bumps in the road etc.
The next day, as we were heading out to lunch, we saw (and heard!) a strange spectacle coming up our street. There came the two sales droids happily pushing the VAX ("but it's got wheels so what's the problem!?") over the rough asphalt, over cobblestones and... you get the picture. They were going fast too, the thing was shaking and vibrating so bad we heard it more than saw it.
Did the thing work after this? Yup, it booted right up without a hickup.
A friend of mine once dropped a MicroVAX I (he was carrying it down some stairs). The cabinet looked like a train wreck, but after some industrial adjustment with a hammer and some crazy glue for the plastic bits it worked just fine. The QBUS cards were all fine as they came flying out of the enclosure upon impact.
Oh yeah, and then there was the time at an earlier employer when one of the networking guys accidentaly laid a VAX 11/785 (with UNIBUS cabinet) on its side. He was adding some cable or whatever and removed all the floor tiles (not every second one as he should have) from immediately behind the VAX. This meant the VAX was only resting on some relatively thin metal rods which suddenly didn't have any sideways support anymore so they started giving... you could see the VAX moving slowly backwards and then suddenly crashing into the next VAX (an 8600) behind it.
Here's the thing: Both VAXen kept running.
I once decomissioned a MicroVAX II (Q5) that had an uptime of over 4 years. It had been used heavily almost 24/7 (for compiling) until it was replaced by a 3600. No cluster, no redundant hw, just a lone machine built from the best components the computer industry has ever seen.
You know what they used to say about DEC Engineering? That their motto was: "When in doubt, use the biggest capacitor available". Or what they used to say about DEC Sales? That if you tried to call a DEC salesdriod they would immediately demand: "How did you get this number?!?"
For a top notch engineering company they sure as hell didn't market their stuff very well. Ah well, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.
G
Re:Dead DEC (Score:2, Interesting)
It was only later, when the IBM PC had won, that MS-DOS was ported to the Rainbow.
I remember how I attended a computer fair (MikroData) in Copenhagen in the years 1984 and 1985. In 1984 booths showing secondary equipment (computer tables, printers and other devices, etc) had typically obtained (loaned? rented?) a Rainbow to show. Next year, all machines used for display were IBM PCs.
(Oh, and in 1984 I typed my first "ls" on a Z8000 Cromemco machine, possibly running CROMIX? In 1985 I think they had a huge inflated "Macintosh" at the Apple booth. Also the LISA's from the year before were gone, I think.)
-Lasse
Aspiring SysAdmin circa 1989. (Score:3, Interesting)
I went to work for DEC as a computer operator in late '89 at the Cupertino, CA. chip plant where they manufacturered the M-sets for the VAX9000. To the guy who mentioned that "they used to be water cooled". Part of the engineering challenge was an air cooled mainframe from the drawing board. Air cooled mainframes of that class was the goal.
DECnet being the VMS system data-bus for peripheral devices, virtually any peripheral device, was for me, the "neato" factor. Washing machine sized "hubs", washing machine sized tape drives and refrigerator sized disk cabinet as far as the eye could see.
I remember using a MicroVAX to "join" a DECnet node cluster so that I could look at certain privileged files on one of bigger nodes. The results? It worked. The outcome? I would have gotten away with it if I had cleanly removed the MicroVAX from the cluster. About a dozen complaints later, the System Managers came looking for the MicroVAX causing a bottleneck. I was able to keep the MicroVAX by letting them know how I did it. Fortunate for me, it wasn't anything more complicated than the fact that DECnet would simply let *any* node join a cluster.
The Alpha was DEC's savior but they insisted on marketing it as a Windows server platform. Olsen never saw the decline of the mainframe market coming and the DEC marketing geeks were too mainframe market oriented (read that as "high margin revenue, long term contract") and rubbed elbows too closely with government types. This developed a "build it and they will buy it" mindset. Change was sluggish at DEC and that is being kind.