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Operating Systems Software IT

An Interview With Mark Gorham Of OpenVMS 161

Posted by timothy from the installable-personality dept.
Ken Farmer writes "There's already been one press interview with Mark Gorham, but that encounter with HP's VP of the OpenVMS Systems Division omitted some technical details that warrant further attention. Hence, SKHPC thought it appropriate to go on a deep dive with one experienced in OpenVMS and SCUBA diving as well."
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An Interview With Mark Gorham Of OpenVMS More

An Interview With Mark Gorham Of OpenVMS

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  • OpenVMS on my camera (Score:3, Funny)

    by Ingolfke ( 515826 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @05:42PM (#11413586) Journal
    If your camera was based on open standards you could port OpenVMS to it.

    • Cutler's original kernel was written in assembler. I assume that it was completely replaced with something in C. Was this done for VMS 5, or later (for the Alpha port)?

      Was VMS designed with clustering in mind from the start? Did clusters really get going with v5?

      Although, for a guy who implemented his kernel in assembler, Cutler's comment that UNIX "is a junk OS designed by a committee of Ph.D.s" is a little shaky, even if he was the project leader for Windows NT.

      • Calling Unix a 'junk OS' is streaching it a little, but personally I do feel that VMS is the more worthy of the two. Its funny that Windows is moving in on areas that Unix is traditionally king, since before it was Unix moving in on OS's that were technically superior. At this rate, in 50 years it will be amazing to have a system that can stay up longer then a day.
        • Its funny that Windows is moving in on areas that Unix is traditionally king...

          This is true over the past several years, but, unless Microsoft really turns around its business model, I don't see them having much of a chance with the resurgence of UNIX/Linux. How can Microsoft compete with systems that are more mature, more open, cost less, and are beginning to provide a comparable user experience (better if talking about Apple)? I think Microsoft must really be sweating about now thinking of ways to pre

      • Re:How much of Dave Cutler's OpenVMS is left? (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Clustering started in VMS 4.0, and was really going by or before V5.0
      • Cutler's original kernel was written in assembler

        I thought VAX VMS was originally written in Bliss32 with some bits in Macro32.
      • I don't know how much of Cutler's original work was in Assembler and how much was in BLISS, since that too was a popular language at DEC. I heard long ago (around the time of VMS v3) that Cutler's original work was really crude -- he was the master of a quick V1, but his code was inefficient, so it had largely been rewritten early on. Maybe he did just use Assembler and leave BLISS to other "wimpier" coders.

        Also bear in mind that the original VAX instruction set was really huge, allowing one assembler in
      • The system implementation language for VMS was BLISS. The MACRO-32 assembly language was based thereon. The VAX hardware architecture and the VMS OS were co-developed and joined at the hip. As VMS evolved, portions of the OS were rewritten in C. When Alpha came along, the microcode that tied VAX to VMS was obsolete... VMS knew nothing of the Alpha architecture. Hence a hardware abstraction layer was used as a go-between. That was PALcode, or Privileged Architecture Library code. PALcode enabled VMS develope
      • Cutler's original kernel was written in assembler. I assume that it was completely replaced with something in C.

        It was rewritten in Bliss-32. VMS seemed to be 75% data structures, 10% interrupts, 10% code and 5% Tibetan prayer wheel.

        Was VMS designed with clustering in mind from the start? Did clusters really get going with v5?

        IIRC clustering started showing itself around V4.6. V5 brought in a new memory manager, global buffering and a few more odds & sods.

        Memory from long-ago very long weekend,

      • The VMS kernel was rewritten in a high level language for the Alpha port (not necessarily C as parts of VMS are written in a number of well known and not so well known languages). At the same time, compliance with POSIX was added and the resulting system became OpenVMS.

        As for Cutler's comments on Unix, he is most certainy biased. Anyone reading Bach's "Design of the Unix Operating System", Tannenbaum's "Operating Systems" or the BSD Daemon book has to be impressed with the cleanliness of the Unix design a

    • True, assuming your camera had enough storage capacity to support the OS. I seriously doubt that you could cram VMS onto the largest currently available memory stick or flash card. ;-}

  • OpenVMS (Score:2, Funny)

    by Homebrewed ( 154837 )
    Is as secure as an attack-trained Rottweiler embedded in a block of black Lucite... ... and about as useful....
  • From the article: "...between 10 to 15 percent of our business comes for accounts that are new to OpenVMS"

    I was under the impression that most companies would want to be migrating away from OpenVMS. Anybody have any good reasons why a company would want to adopt it nowadays?

    • Because the old techs, who are now the management, remember all the fun they used to have with their VMS systems, and they want the young guys to suffer like they did?

      • Re:New VMS users? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by ReverendLoki ( 663861 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @06:10PM (#11413846)
        I spent a few years as an admin on a VMS system. Sure, you had your occasional headache due to some of the OSs oddities, and we ended up writing a lot of code in house for applications that we would have just purchased on any other system, but there were definitely a lot of unique elements that cluster had that I miss. We never had any sort of security breach on that thing, for one. And for the rare instances there was a node crash, the cluster adapted, and the users ever noticed - hell, a few times we wouldn't have either, if it weren't for the logs, due to a clean recovery and automated restart. That system also provided some of the smoothest, most painless rolling reboots.

        I don't think it's necessarily more painful than other systems, but it does seem to be pain that is easier to schedule (more work during your day, fewer middle of the night emergencies).

        Of course, you can't play a lot of games on it...

        • You've obviously never had Kevin Mitnick on your OpenVMS system... or attracted the attention
          of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), whose members at one point (in the old days) targeted
          VAX/VMS systems. Nor have you had Neill Clift go through the OpenVMS source code and
          discover "bugs".

          Don't take it for granted -- just because the O/S is (for all intents and purposes) obscure
          now doesn't mean its "secure" now.

          • You've obviously never had Kevin Mitnick on your OpenVMS system... or attracted the attention of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), whose members at one point (in the old days) targeted VAX/VMS systems. Nor have you had Neill Clift go through the OpenVMS source code and discover "bugs".

            Don't take it for granted -- just because the O/S is (for all intents and purposes) obscure now doesn't mean its "secure" now

            Mitnick never broke into a VMS system. He did steal VMS source code, but that was by social enginee

            • Re:New VMS users? (Score:2, Informative)

              by Lew Payne ( 592648 )
              |
              | Mitnick never broke into a VMS system.

              You're absolutely wrong, glenmark. Mitnick broke into many VAX/VMS systems. One of
              them happened to be "the Arc" -- DEC's development machine. In addition, he broke into the
              VAXes at Leed's University (just ask Neill Clift) and at USC. He also broke into the personal
              workstation (a VAX) at Neill Clift's home, where he nabbed the bug reports before they got
              to Digital. Not to mention his penetration of VPA (Volunteer Plan Administrators) in Calabasas,
              where Lenny Di

              • Re:New VMS users? (Score:3, Interesting)

                by glenmark ( 446320 )

                So, I'm curious -- upon what factual basis do you conclude that "Mitnick never broke into a VAX?" I base my statement that he did upon the fact that, as his co-defendant, I saw the evidence as well as experienced some of it first-hand. You're not one of those people who just repeats hearsay as if it were fact, are you?

                First of all, I never said that Mitnick never broke into a VAX. I said he never broke into a VMS system (some VAXen run Unix). Secondly, I based my statement upon Mitnick's testimony that i

                • Re:New VMS users? (Score:2, Informative)

                  by Lew Payne ( 592648 )
                  | First of all, I never said that Mitnick never broke into a VAX.
                  | I said he never broke into a VMS system (some VAXen run Unix).

                  Likewise, when I said "Mitnick broke into many VAX/VMS systems" (the
                  second sentence in my first paragraph), I qualified it. Unfortunately,
                  I was ambiguous later when I said "broke into a VAX".

                  Mitnick did indeed break into VAX/VMS systems, using flaws discovered
                  by the CCC (Chaos Computer Club) as well as by intercepting PGP email
                  communications between Neill Clift (of Leed's Uni

    • Re:New VMS users? (Score:5, Informative)

      by VAXcat ( 674775 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @06:07PM (#11413824)
      Reliability, scalability, uptime, high performance wide area clustering, no viruses, very few security problems of any kind (and those occur mostly in code migrated from unixland). A few of the reasons people choose VMS for an operating system. Individual VMS systems often have multi year uptimes (even in heavily used environments). VMS clusters have uptimes even longer still. And that's leaving out any of the religious flavored arguments about what OS is easier to administer and use.
    • It's almost scary how stable VMS is. We reboot our VMS boxes about once each year.

      • Re:New VMS users? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by 0racle ( 667029 )
        I knew a company that rebooted their VMS boxes once a year when the building did their power test. It was more fear of a power spike then anything elss. Other then that, they never had a need to reboot the systems.

        Its not scary, its what an Enterprise Class OS should be.
    • >Anybody have any good reasons why a company would want to adopt it nowadays?

      1) OpenVMS runs 24 x 365
      2) It has clustering that actually works
      3) It runs 24 x 365
      4) It takes to fibre channel storage like a fish to water
      5) It runs 24 x 365
      6) You can stake your personal reputation on a system that runs OpenVMS and not have to constantly carry a copy of your resume on a USB flashdrive in your pocket
      7) Did I mention that it runs 24 x 365?
      8) Scales like crazy


      -Scott
      Former VMS Dude/Fibre Channel Pl
    • They're upgrading from RSTS/E.

  • Nice quote snippet... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rjstanford ( 69735 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @05:46PM (#11413641) Homepage Journal
    "...pretty popular in the low-end market (1-8 CPUs, up to 64GB of memory..."

    Yup. Its refreshing to actually see opinions like this acknoledged on /., if even in a linked-to article, where for the longest time a 4 way box was considered xtR3m3 (or whatever the l33t spelling would be these days).

    And no, there's not really much of a need for a beowolf cluster of those things. Imagine a life instead. Mmm... isn't that nicer?

    Yeah, yeah, flamebait...
    • Imagine a VAXCluster of... oh wait.
    • There are areas where a Beowulf cluster blows a VMScluster right out of the water. HPTC comes to mind. Contrast the price/performance of a 96-node cluster of 64-processor Alpha/VMS boxes lashed together with a Quadrics interconnect with that of a 512-node cluster of 2-processor Linux econoboxes linked with Myrinet or a similar low-cost interconnect. Beowulf wins hands-down. VMS ceased to be a viable HPTC option ages ago. At one time, VMScluster was the way to go, but that was well before LINPACK numbers app

  • the reports of my death ... greatly exaggerated... (Score:4, Informative)

    by lophophore ( 4087 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @06:02PM (#11413791) Homepage
    VMS keeps coming back, and appearing on Slashdot like a bad penny. The IA64 has breathed new life into this OS, which is the most secure and stable that I have had the pleasure to use. VMS had a C2 security rating out of the box in 1990 or so, but what this article does not mention is that a variant version (SEVMS) carried a full B2 rating., which is really something.

    Mark who? I don't know his name. I worked for DEC VMS Engineering in the VAX and Alpha days, who is this guy?

    This article makes it seem like the idea of building unix apps on VMS is a new thing. It's not. VMS Posix was available in 1992, and many Unix/C apps would just compile and run. It was very cool.

    The dinosaur is aging very well.

    • Re:the reports of my death ... greatly exaggerated (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Rorschach1 ( 174480 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @06:33PM (#11414079) Homepage
      I started working on VMS systems in 1997, so I was a relative latecomer to the OS. Still, I quickly learned to appreciate what it's capable of. The ancient hardware I've got in my garage (VAX 6000, VAXstation 3100s, MicroVAX IIs, AlphaStation 200) is capable of more useful and reliable clustering, out of the box, than Windows 2000 AS. Almost undoubtedly better than 2003 as well.

      I've had to migrate a legacy VMS application to a Windows 2000 AS cluster, and after 10 years of operation with no more than a few hours' downtime at any given time, the old Alpha cluster is ready to be shut down next week. It's sad to see it go - the Windows version will probably never be as solid and reliable, but what counts to management is that for the price of annual hardware and software maintenance on the old cluster we can buy all new Dell servers with 3-year warranties every year or two.

      I did once set up an OpenVMS machine with the intent of taking it to DefCon, but never got around to it. Others did, though, and there's nothing like watching a bunch of hotshot Unix crackers pounding their heads on their keyboards out of frustration.

      (And that's just trying to get a volume listing, not breaking in!)

    • If VMS also worked on Alpha, what were the barriers for VMS that allowed UNIX to gain more share? UNIX was expensive back then, so unless VMS was really expensive, that couldn't have been a barrier. Was it just DEC's infamous marketing dept.? It seems that other comments make VMS out to be a pretty nice OS.

      • Re:the reports of my death ... greatly exaggerated (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        For a long time Digital had the .edu market mostly locked up despite BSD and other unix variants. Then they got greedy in the .edu space by charging large fees for the o/s when it had been either free or nearly so. That toasted the .edu market for them and the breeding ground for many VMS-conversant users.

        Then Sun cam along and offered better price/performance, which Digital declined to match either through inertia, stupidity, or hubris.

        Many organizations did NOT want to switch from VMS, but when it becam
      • Yep. DECs infamously inept marketing. They had the best engineered solutions that money could buy (a lot of money) but they could not sell to save themselves. So sad.
      • By many reports, VMS was killed by Ken Olson, the founder of DEC. He believed in proprietary hardware, which kept the market closed and proprietary as well -- the competition had cheaper disk available, so down went the VAX and it's closely-locked four-mode operating system. Mind you the standards of the day (or lack thereof) sort of encouraged it, but FUD was alive and well at The Mill in Maynard and had a lot to do with their gradual decline. (I jumped ship when they sold off RDB and AltaVista). DCL w

    • Re:the reports of my death ... greatly exaggerated (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      SEVMS had a B1 rating - NOT a B2 rating. VMS could never have gotten a B2 rating, due to inherent covert channel problems in the lock manager.
    • VMS keeps coming back, and appearing on Slashdot like a bad penny.

      To be perfectly honest, the same can be said of UNIX. UNIX (and a variety of UNIXalikes) was in steep decline in the early 1990s. In quite a few techie circles it was looked at as outdated, awkward technology. And now of course all UNIX-like operating systems are completely dead.
    • OK, a few facts for the record. I wrote the the Q's that Mark Gorham provided the A's to in the interview posted on my Web site. So I'm the perpetrator of what has turned into a Fine Mess.

      I know plenty about SEVMS and its B2 security level rating as well as the circa-1992 VIP (VMS Integrated POSIX). I left this information out of the article because many of its intended readers don't know C2 from B2, and that VIP didn't cut it as a UNIX development environment. Better to keep things simple, the interview

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • We have a VaxCluster of VaxServer 4000's that is now about 10 years old, supports 300 users on an old legacy ALLIN1 system that they access on their PC's using Powerterm. The users love the system, a replacement system would cost maybe £250000 to write & implement, if it ain't broke why fix it? I think we can count the downtime in those 10 years in minutes instead of hours.

    Only downside is that I suspect those suckers don't half use a lot of electricity :D

    Jonathan
    • OpenVMS 6.2 on some VAX machine that I always forget the model number of (the door is removed and I never have to look at it.)

      Due to the contract maintenence cost for what it is really used for now (inter-office e-mail of all things) I am trying to get rid of it, re-educate employees who still use WP 5.1 to use a PC and OO.org or MS Office.

      OpenVMS is great. Old DEC hardware cannot be beat. So it is a shame I will never use either again, nor would I want to.
    • Oh geeze I thought I was alone in the world. We're running an alpha2100 for allin1 along with a 1200 for development work and a 7820 (77? you'd think I'd know but this stuff is so solid it's 'just there') for production. Funding is an impediment to migrating anywhere..... We use linux and windows but neither comes close to VMS for reliability and security.
    • Three hundred users? What now seems like a century ago, we had 120 users on a microvax 4100, all using VT220's and connected via emulex terminal servers (running LAT, of course). The Centronics band printers (P300 and P600) were also connected to the Emulex terminal servers, since each came with a Centronics parallel port.

      Those were the fun days... where you made the most of the hardware you had, and got the most out of the software you wrote.

      Alas, if only Ken Olsen were 20 years younger...
      • Where I work we run two vt220's still.

        One monitors a terminal server and the other monitors an old DEC "Infoserver" (tower of x1 SCSI CDROMS).

        I think the manufacturing date on those vt220's is 1983 or 1984.
        • What do you use for the "console" device? I always had a hardcopy device on
          the console port... usually an LA120 DecWriter.

          All our multi-location warehousing apps were written in DIBOL, by yours truly.

          The company expanded to the point where it was a viable take-over candidate,
          and the merger put us all on an AS/400.

          I left almost 10 years ago, but oh, how I long for the old days of VMS (and the
          wonderful RMS file system).

          I'd love to develop apps for an OpenVMS shop, but alas, I'm probably too old
          and

    • I was running stock market matching systems with the smallest possible fault-tolerant multi-machine cluster; a pair of AlphaServers with a shared SCSI bus for the quorum disk. One such cluster in Dublin had an uptime of 1114 days that was only shutdown to move the whole datacenter. Most of the clusters I ran worldwide had uptimes over two years, usually brought down by datacenter outages.

      At one point I ran a cluster that had machines in datacenters in New York City, New Jersey and Boston. To the end u

  • OpenVMS, a viable option (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Cowherd X ( 850136 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @06:20PM (#11413926) Journal

    I really enjoyed using OpenVMS and although I no longer use it on a daily basis I do still have an account on a friend's system that I log into from time to time. That interview reminded me of how wonderfully supportive the OpenVMS community is, even if you don't like OpenVMS you have to love the spirit, dedication and willingness to help of these guys. I especially remember the USENET posts by the recently departed John Wisniewski [openvms.org]. Here is one of his posts in which he names the top "F" reasons OpenVMS is not going to die.

    TOP "F" REASONS OPENVMS ISN'T GOING TO DIE
    (Y2K LATE EDITION VERSION)

    F)Hey, Free Hobbyist Licenses available on the NET! Just like those guys who don't make any money off their OSes...

    E)If OpenVMS was a separate company it would be in the fortune list at 384

    D)Xwindows, SAMBA, Apache, Java, COM and all that Open Systems SW On a platform that's always available...

    C)DIICOE -- Not just for Unix systems anymore -- Compaq signed a 15 year agreement with the US Government for continuing OpenVMS support and infusion with Open System and Open Source APIs and unlike POSIX, there real applications written to these standards!

    B)Shared Everything Clusters with live, redundant datacenters over 540 miles apart... (No Hot Standby here;-)

    A)3.9 Billion in OpenVMS Sales World Wide last year
    -- One of Compaq's most profitable business units

    9)One Word: Wildfire, eh, GS series, eh, Alpha, eh Galaxy, Eh OpenVMS

    8)Wanna buy a lottery ticket?

    7)200 Million spent on R&D last year
    -- Anyone want to work in VMS engineering?
    We got openings and I get a bonus to recruit:-)

    6)Healthcare, and Finance, and Telecom! Oh MY!

    5)Used VAXen and Alphas are going on E-bay for more than you can get them through brokers!

    4)Kevin Mitnick just testified before congress he hasn't been able to get into VMS since version 4 when he stole version 5 with a 1200 baud modem...

    3)You want to be able to CHARGE people for their cellphone time?

    2)VAX can't die until after I beat the Balrog in Moria 4.81.

    1)VMS is Windows 2000 ready even if no-one has deployed the new Windows 2000 security domains yet!
  • It's a looong time since I was a VMS admin, but in about 5 years the mini (a VAX 11/750) we were running on crashed exactly twice, possibly because the hardware was so old. The fact that you could still get 30 people happily compiling and testing Pascal on a system that was a decade old is testament to the lean efficiency of the system.

    There's a lot of stuff in VMS that's still extremely nifty. Self tuning, stability and consistency across the OS. Nope, it's not a sexy OS, but sometimes you need something

  • Nowadays it is not common to have hardware available to install OpenVMS or any other VMS flavor. This project [vistech.net] allows users to create free accounts in a OpenVMS cluster. I have created one for me and I'm trying to learn a little of this system, which looks like very interesting.

    If you want to get started at OpenVMS this book [snee.com] is recommended. It is very basic and for beginners.

    -- Gustavo
  • What a way to go. Tied to an old DEC VAX and dropped at sea...
  • Just to save all you other OCD victims out there when asked to reply in 50 words or less Mark Gorham replies in 38, assuming OpenVMS counts as one.
  • I miss the days when I worked on the old VAX mainframes running VMS.... Then again I also kinda miss my old Commodore VIC-20....

  • reasons for using VMS (Score:3, Insightful)

    by belmolis ( 702863 ) <billposer@@@alum...mit...edu> on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @07:12PM (#11414450) Homepage

    The people I have known who ran VMS were all physicists and electrical engineers who had large amounts of legacy Fortran code that they didn't want to port, and for which the VMS Fortran compiler was said to be superior to anything available for UNIX at the time. I wonder to what extent eople actually like VMS as an OS and to what extent its survival is due to heritage code?

    • Well, I'll admit to liking VMS. It has been a few years since I've used it, but there were definately some nice things about it. It was definately designed to be used in large systems with lots of users, unlike Unix. It had features like privileges for just about everything that you can think of - much finer granularity than all or nothing. It had a fairly well developed system of ACLs that could be attached to operating system objects other than files (unlike Unix, not everything is a file in VMS). On
    • The reason I loved it was for the System Services and Runtime Library. You could do things in VMS that no Unix box could do unless you wrote the plumbing yourself from scratch. I had mixed feelings moving to Ultrix. It was great to be in a good Unix environment and all but I missed a great deal of the power of the VMS libraries. Dunno why DEC didn't port them but I heard that a lot of the libs were in assembler.
    • IMNSHO, there is no better platform for developing and deploying robust and reliable turnkey or dedicated systems.

  • Wanna try OpenVMS? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @07:14PM (#11414479)
    Many, many posts come from people who have _never_ touched OpenVMS. For these people, I invite you to the Deathrow OpenVMS Cluster. This is a OpenVMS cluster (running OpenVMS 7.2) or VAXen and Alphas. It's free for use by the general public. Yes - you get access to the compilers (COBOL, Java, C, FORTRAN, BASIC, MACRO, and much more!). The entire point of the system is for people unfamiliar with OpenVMS to have the change to _play_ with OpenVMS.

    Check out http://deathrow.vistech.net for how to open your own account.

    • Hooray!
      After a year of trying to push my local chapter of encompass to even properly process my registration so I could get an OpenVMS license, this is a godsend. They do not do themselves any favours, and the closed nature of the license program is puzzling considering their competition with *nix.

  • Does anyone know of a complete list of Alpha boxes that can run OpenVMS? I have searched for this before and never found anything conclusive. The last one I found said that none of the Personal Workstation series would run OpenVMS. This while I had PWS 500 under my desk at work running OpenVMS. My understanding is that none of the NT capable Alphas will work.
    • See the VMS Software Product Description (SPD) available at from HP [hp.com] Fair sized PDF, scroll down to page 25 or so for a list of supported systems. Disk and tape devices on the pages following.

      As a general rule, for older systems, you need SCSI disk and CD, something that supports the full SCSI standard. You a PWS "u" is the same as a PWS with a SCSI controller/disk. Check google groups (comp.os.vms) for advice on these upgrades. Some of the newer Alphas understand IDE now.

      The neat thing about Open

    • None of the Alpha's with only AlphaBIOS (for NT) and no SRM will run vms, this is only the AlphaXL series as far as i know..
      Also, the multia isn't supported with VMS but there are hacks to get it working, every other Alpha should run VMS just fine..
  • Cluster applications do not need to be cluster aware or written in any special fachion. All cluster resources are potentially usable by any program running on any node at any time. Clusters are easily scalable both in CPU horsepower and number of processors. Great gobs of system resources do not need to be allocated to run the pretty GUI desktop in order to run the cluster.
  • The company I was working for in 1979 put an order in for a VAX/11-780 which we received in 1980. It was VAX serial number 21. The tech guy installing it said that the first 18 were for internal DEC use. It came with two RM80 (80Mb disks), 256K Mem, an expansion cabnet and a vacuum column 9 track tape drive... All for about $320K USD.

    The back plane was all wire-wrap and the CPU was contained on four of the cards that plugged into the back-plane. The micro code wad uploaded from an 8" floppy loaded in a PDP
  • I did a little bit of Fortran back in '93 on VMS. If I remember correctly, each file of the VMS filesystem had a version number, which was incremented automatically by the system, each time the file was changed.

    It was such a useful feature! I haven't seen it anywhere else. It meant that you did not need to worry about previous versions and backups when coding an application.

    This feature could solve lots of problems in todays system:

    1) the DLL hell would not exist, if applications used versioned libraries

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