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!"
Oh man! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh man! (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't trash them if you don't have to. (Score:5, Informative)
If any VAXs admins are reading this and are preparing to send their machines to the landfill, why not check to see if your hardware is on OpenBSD's wanted hardware list [openbsd.org]? They actively maintain a native VAX port (and it's damn good geek karma!)
Re:Don't trash them if you don't have to. (Score:5, Funny)
Fact: *BSD is dying
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: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!
VAX emulators (Score:5, Informative)
The article mentions SRI's Charon VAX. This is very expensive software that requires a USB dongle for licensing.
However, you can also run VAX VMS on a free i386 VAX emulator called SIMH [trailing-edge.com]. I don't seem to be able to get very good ethernet performance with SIMH. However, you can run NetBSD/VAX on it out of the box, and OpenBSD will run with a kernel patch. SIMH also has a PDP-11 emulator and includes images of the original UNIX V7 from AT&T (courtesy of SCaldera). SIMH is an interesting way to run both ancient and modern UNIXen without reformatting your PC.
You can also get free VMS licenses [montagar.com] for SIMH/VAX. They must be renewed yearly.
Alpha VMS also supported a VAX binary emulator called VEST [uruk.org], which is mentioned in another post here. Support for VEST is dying, however (modern RDB releases have dropped it). The Charon VAX emulator also runs on Alpha VMS.
Re:VAX emulators (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, all the reliablility of a modern PC, with the syntax of VMS. Someone must really be into S&M.
Dean G.
Re:VAX emulators (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Don't trash them if you don't have to. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
6 years of uptime? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:6 years of uptime? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:6 years of uptime? (Score:5, Funny)
Six Years? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Six Years? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Six Years? (Score:5, Funny)
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: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.
Re:6 years of uptime? (Score:5, Funny)
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:Vax versus Google (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Vax versus Google (Score:3, Informative)
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
UNC-Chapel Hill? (Score:2)
Sounds like the way people at UNC-Chapel Hill accessed the internet, circa 1994 - via dialup shells, PINE, and FTP, all through a single VAX box.
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 i
Re:Ah, the VAX... I miss it. (Score:4, Informative)
Systems dudes I worked with also thought VMS's real-time features beat the **** out of Unix, but I'm not an expert on that.
Do science labs still run VMS on alphas, or are they going the way of the dinosaur?
Re:Ah, the VAX... I miss it. (Score:2)
Re:Ah, the VAX... I miss it. (Score:5, Interesting)
I call bullshit! (Score:5, Funny)
You can't have more than one person using a computer at the same time! They'd fight over the mouse!
It must be hard for Windows users to imagine... (Score:5, Funny)
Hell, with the critical-update-du-jour lately, it's probably hard for Windows users to imagine a computer that's been running since the previous week without being rebooted.
Strange Cousins (Score:3, Funny)
The strange thing is that Windows XP is an indirect descendant of the OS that probably is running on those VAX systems with those giant swinging uptimes. The story goes that back in the day, the Windows NT team had a large number of VMS vetrans on board, and that there was more than a little bit of code in common between VMS and Windows NT. The story is actually kinda interesting; you can read about it here [win2000mag.com].
The urban legend is that Windows NT is so called because if you "add" one letter to each of VMS, y
Re:Strange Cousins (Score:4, Informative)
In the end, the i860 turned out to be not such a good idea and they moved NT to MIPS -- a chip preferred by Cutler -- as well as familiar to some of the ex-digital crew since I believe Cutler had managed the compiler group for the MIPS-Based DECStations.
Ironically.... Windows NT/2k is VMS's Child (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It must be hard for Windows users to imagine... (Score:5, Informative)
Right here [microsoft.com].
"Your uptime has been positively incremented.... (Score:5, Funny)
[ OK ] [ Cancel ]
Re:Why I love my new Dell notebook (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe your gateway should be called WINDOWS. Given what it leads to and all.
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.
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...
Big Deal... (Score:5, Funny)
Hahaha....i have a computer that has not had a reboot in almost 10 years.
In fact it's still somewhere in the closet.
I should plug it in sometime....
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
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.
Re:6 year uptimes... (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong. A local root exploit means any remote exploit becomes a remote root exploit.
VAX in modern poetry (Score:5, Funny)
And plunged it deep into the VAX;
Don't you envy people who
Do all the things YOU want to do?
[Unknown]
VAX in music (Score:3, Funny)
Careful with that VAX, Eugene!
It sounds like they want new VAXs... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?!
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
How many times have VAX users heard this? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
VAX replacement? (Score:4, Interesting)
Alpha? (Score:5, Informative)
Funny, the article does not mention Alphas. Has HP buried that architecture so well?
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.
Upgrade time! (Score:2)
The article mentioned migrating from a 10-year old VAX machine to a dual Athlon. I'll bet that the dual Athlon is 4x faster, and cost 10x less.
steve
Reliability....Priceless (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Reliability....Priceless (Score:5, Informative)
- It was the University of North Carolina, not a data center.
- It was walled in mistakenly by maintenance workers, not by a remodeling project.
- The server was eventually found by following network cables.
Full article [theregister.co.uk]Nathan
itanium? (Score:4, Interesting)
VAX tech? Hah! (Score:5, Funny)
Right.
Show me RMS's heavier and less-well-groomed brother in Birkenstocks, a T-shirt, and suspenders and I'd be a little more likely to believe it.
HP consolidation has finally arrived. (Score:2)
HP is really keen on getting rid of their older inherited platforms...DEC systems are known for their reliability, and I know a lot of hospitals, etc. that use them for daily production work. It's definitely a minority now, but they were huge back in the day. Qualified VMS people will be very well-paid as migration consult
Not So Subtle Hint (Score:2)
including hints of the port of OpenVMS to Itanium
I guess porting to the Alpha wasn't enough of a hint that they wanted to kill VMS:)
Now, of course, the Itanic is going down in a big way since Intel decided to go with ix86-64...
I'm only surprised they didn't port VMS to the i860.
6 year uptime ? Phooey. (Score:5, Funny)
Pah. My abacus (which has been handed down through 3 generations) has had an uptime of nearly 100 years. And apart from missing a few of the counters (I was a curious child) it still works great.
Them thar 'puters are just new fangled junk.
There are STILL vaxen??? (Score:3, Funny)
Y2K meant NOTHING to VMS users (Score:5, Interesting)
Nostalgia (Score:3, Interesting)
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: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 ag
[Unvarnished Plug] Port to unix (Score:4, Interesting)
--dave
Writing on the wall (Score:5, Funny)
An old VAX tale (Score:5, Funny)
Intermediate step: SIMH (Score:3, Informative)
A good intermediate step in any migration is to use the SIMH simulator (http://simh.trailing-edge.com [trailing-edge.com]). SIMH can simulate quite a few systems (including a VAX) at the CPU level. As you may expect, this involves emulating every single CPU instruction... not a very efficient way to run code! However, its saving grace is that modern processors are very fast and old VAX systems are not. Depending on how old your VAX hardware is, you might find that an emulated VAX running on a newer P4/Xeon/Athlon/Opteron will be faster than the stock VAX!
This doesn't solve the migration problem but it does allow you to run your old code on modern easily-fixable and readily-available hardware. Beats having to get all of your parts off of eBay.
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.
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 po
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
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.
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 _KNEW_ VMS... (Score:4, Interesting)
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: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 proces
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 hav
Ahh... The good old times... (Score:4, Funny)
I also remember when we got an upgrade to the "new" VAX line. The old ones used to be these big washing machine types of machines, we had them in the 3rd floor, and remember waiting up there to see how they get the new washing machines up there.
I was waiting for a while with a colleague, when suddenly a technician came in, carrying a little box under his arm. He put the box on the old washing machine, reconnected some cables and left... Leaving me a my friend open-mouthed.
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
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...
The picture in the article.. (Score:4, Informative)
There was originally a water cooled version, but by using heatsinks that look like a bed of nails, and ducting the cooling air from a blower in the bottom of the unit to impinge individually on each heatsink ( the ducting is removed in the pic ) it was possible to ditch all the water cooling hardware.
These systems were meant for raised floor installations where chilled air was blown up thru missing floor panels, right into the fan intake.
And that is not a real service guy... he does not have a static strap!
It's kind of strange that the article makes no mention of HP Remarketing, which still provides parts and support.
six year uptime seems kinda small! (Score:4, Interesting)
Migrating to Inanium is an "upgrade"? (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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.
Re:Uh? VAX? What year is this? (Score:2)
Re:Uh? VAX? What year is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:MicroVax (Score:2)
Reformat it... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:getting there (Score:3, Funny)
Bad command or file name
hmmm...
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
Re:Migration to more expensive hardware (Score:3, Informative)