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Programming Compaq HP IT Technology

First OpenVMS Boot On IA64 300

Posted by chrisd from the hp-isn't-so-bad-I-guess dept.
vaxzilla writes "At 3:31pm EST on Friday, January 31st, 2003, OpenVMS for the Intel IA64 architecture successfully booted and ran a DIR command. The Intel Itanium family of processors is the third architecture supported by OpenVMS in its 25 year history. Originally it ran on Digital Equipment Corporation VAX systems; in the early 1990s, support was added for the DEC Alpha processors. Following the acquisition of DEC by Compaq, and more recently Compaq by HP, the Itanium and Itanium2 port of OpenVMS is now being undertaken by HP. Congratulations on a job well done to the folks at ZK03 in Nashua, NH!"
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First OpenVMS Boot On IA64 More

First OpenVMS Boot On IA64

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  • Wow!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 01, 2003 @10:11PM (#5208088)
    An itanium based platform can produce a listing of files!!!!

    This is truly a breakthrough. Intel is waay ahead in computing than companies like Nike or Coca Cola.

  • The more things change (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Notice they don't actually show you the directory listing in question?

    Because it was PR0N.

  • Modern VMS applications? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by diamond0 ( 456988 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @10:15PM (#5208108)
    I know it's present in some legacy systems, and supported by Compaq for that reason. But why would we want VMS on new hardware? What new stuff runs on VMS these days?

    • Re:Modern VMS applications? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by moertle ( 140345 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @10:22PM (#5208151) Homepage
      i know a company that is always making incremental upgrades to their 'legacy' software to take full advantage of newer hardware. it also allows them to do things like consalidate 5 old machines into 1 new machine with 20x the power so there are cycles to spare.
    • Supposedly VMS is a pretty secure and reliable operating system.

      VMS -> Unix is like Unix -> NT.

      Of course since fewer people are using VMS there are fewer data points.
    • I know it's present in some legacy systems, and supported by Compaq for that reason. But why would we want VMS on new hardware? What new stuff runs on VMS these days?

      You do know that Unix hails from 1970 and VMS from 1978 don't you? It always amazes me when Unix kiddies don't seem to realize that VMS is actually more modern.

      People use VMS when scalability and reliability matter. It's perhaps 15 years ahead of Unix for that (i.e. VMS clusters 15 years ago are where Unix clusters are now). You can do useful stuff like add a node to a cluster, migrate the applications onto it, shut down the original node, and the users won't even notice a gap in application availability. Add to that real ACLs and a versionning, journalled filesystem (things that modern Unix has only gotten in the last few years), and very fine-grained tunability, for example you can set the working set size per process and configure the system to assign different priorities to programs or users at different times. And DECnet is smart enough to authenticate user at the packet level, inherently more secure than TCP/IP.

      Essentially, VMS died because DEC was run by engineers who thought that a good product would sell itself, whereas Sun et al were smart enough to hire marketers by the boatload.
      • I used VMS for years. Unix and it's utilities were far beyond it, even back when I used it. Windows is more modern that Unix, and you don't find people "in the know" saying it's the greatest thing since sliced bread either. PF1-Gold indeed
        • You do realize that PF1-Gold has exactly crap to do with VMS? Sounds like you were using one of Digital's word processing systems tied to a VAXCluster. I remember binding the PF keys on VT102 for those times when I had to use EDT for editing, but most of my time was spent in Emacs anyway, which worked just fine.

          DCL (the CLI for VMS) didn't need any more special keys than bash does. At the time I used it, its biggest weakness was an extraordinarily lame way of implementing interprocess pipelining. It was so slow that you would re-write utilities to be specificially interprocess aware and talk through mailboxes (which had nothing to do with e-mail) rather than let the shell handle the commands as filters, a la *nix.

          The priviledge model on the other hand, was beautiful. You could keep know-it-all snots just out of college (like me) out of trouble by giving them only what they needed to do for the job. Unix's model of God and Peon pales by comparison.

          And the clustering. Jeebus, you've not even seen clustering until you've seen VMS. We were doing more with clusters and shared resources in 1989 than most systems can do today.

          Digital had the marketing sense of a camel's rear end, but they hired damned good engineers. Just goes to show that the best technology doesn't always win. Something to chew over when you contemplate the fate of the Unices versus the marketing monster from Redmond.

    • If you want reliability and security, OpenVMS is still the only answer. Their clustering is the best around, probably because they have had it for over 20 years. That is a lot of experience.

      Go to Eurex [eurexchange.com], for example. They are the largest electronic financial derivatives exchange in the world and their core systems run OpenVMS. SWIFT (the money transfer people) still do a lot with VMS as do many other people.

      I have been looking at the problem of rewriting exchanges onto modern, cheaper hardware platforms with other operating systems. It really isn't easy.

    • I know it's present in some legacy systems, and supported by Compaq for that reason. But why would we want VMS on new hardware? What new stuff runs on VMS these days?

      Pretty much anyone serious about process control or mission critical stuff uses VMS. UNIX simply cannot compete with the levels of reliability those systems routinely achieved. Uptime measured in years is normal. Unscheduled downtime is due to hardware failure - PERIOD.

  • Reasons to use VMS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by palfreman ( 164768 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @10:16PM (#5208111) Homepage
    I used OpenVMS a bit at my universty, and I have to say I never really got into it - getting my solaris account was a great day! I can understand people wanting to maintain legacy apps (big purchasing systems maybe?) but is OpenVMS really good for anything _new_ today? Does it have any real particular advantages that mean you would want to use it for reasons other that "we've already got a stack of Alphas this high on it and gonna keep using it until forever"?

    • Re: Reasons to use VMS (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @10:26PM (#5208165)


      > but is OpenVMS really good for anything _new_ today?

      The answer to your question is cultural rather than technical. VMS is a superb OS, but it is now viewed as déclassé in most circles, so it only has a thin slice of mindshare. That's not really any more a reflection on it than the thin slice of mindshare given to some very excellent programming languages.

      I more than half wish the OSS revolution had centered around VMS rather than UNIX. There's not the slightest reason we couldn't be doing all the things we do under VMS... except the "price architecture". Put a free+open version on x86 and Linux might have some hot competition.

      • You may have described why I have fond memories of this arcane, yet robust operating system. The command line syntax may have been puzzle, but people who I worked with were supportive and fun to be with. Digital made the highest quality equipment (uptime measured in years,) but VMS had a productive and gentle culture. The fact that my peer group had good taste in beer (and brewed their own too) also may have helped too.

        VMS will never be forgotten. It may be complex kind of user friendly, but the system was a work of art. Hopefully, parts of it will find the mainstream and live forever.

      • Re: Reasons to use VMS (Score:2, Insightful)

        by shess ( 31691 )
        I more than half wish the OSS revolution had centered around VMS rather than UNIX. There's not the slightest reason we couldn't be doing all the things we do under VMS... except the "price architecture". Put a free+open version on x86 and Linux might have some hot competition.

        Back in the 80's I had access to our campus VMS machine, and to the Unix box. I think the big difference was that the VMS machine very much restricted what I could do, the Unix machine didn't. So, I spent more time on the Unix machine. This probably has two root causes: VMS gave the admin more ability to control users, and VMS was more expensive to run than Unix in terms of hardware and whatnot (so the Unix admin didn't care as much).

        As mentioned elsewhere, this is certainly a "culture" issue. But VMS seemed to enable a culture of control, while Unix enabled more anarchy. OSS software falls out of anarchy.
    • with openvms, you could play galtrader!

    • Re:Reasons to use VMS (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Trolling4Dollars ( 627073 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @11:04PM (#5208340) Journal
      Where I work, we use VMS. Sadly it's going away. But, I do have some really cool storie that my boss passed along to me about his experiences with VMS back in the 80s. He worked at a bank where they had a support group for the two different systems they supported. There was the Wang support group and the VMS support group. The Wang support group was made up of 100+ people who were on call 24/7 and were generally in the offices. The VMS support group was... 1 person. Also on call 24/7, but only ever needed to be there during normal work hours becasuse the system "just worked". I've seen the same thing where I work now. We are moving to HP's Unix and most of the VMS guys are dreading it. Even though I love UNIX and Linux, I have to say that VMS is a lot heartier and very easy to support. To be honest, if DEC/Compaq/HP had been smart, they could have had a great competitor to Windows in the server market if they kept the GUI up to date. Hopefully, someone will port Gnome to it and get it to have a bit more of a modern feel for the server monkeys.

    • Re:Reasons to use VMS (Score:5, Informative)

      by Garin ( 26873 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @11:12PM (#5208369)
      Yep -- wonderful, reliable, dependable clustering. VMS does clustering like no other operating system that I've ever seen, and it's been doing it for ages.

      • Re:Reasons to use VMS (Score:4, Informative)

        by _xeno_ ( 155264 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @12:10AM (#5208570) Homepage Journal
        Apparently the longest running OpenVMS cluster had an uptime of around fifteen years until the building it was in was condemned and it had to be moved.

        And since a VMS cluster can be fully upgraded automaticaly without any downtime to the cluster as a whole, the system can be continuely upgraded with no downtime to the users.

        OpenVMS's clustering is the reason why most VMS users think that it's so cool. Think about it - 15 years of uptime. That's insane.

  • I am curious as to what sense that OpenVMS is open?

  • In other news: (Score:2, Funny)

    by jim3e8 ( 458859 )
    Commodore One successfully executes LOAD FROGGER,8,1!

  • WOW! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @10:30PM (#5208187) Homepage Journal
    THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!!!

    No, wait... what the hell does this matter? We're shutting the few remaining vaxes at work off soon...isn't everyone?

    - A.P.

  • Very cool.. wish I still cared about VMS (Score:4, Interesting)

    by unfortunateson ( 527551 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @10:36PM (#5208219) Journal
    I grew up on VAX/VMS at school after a highschool exposure to (and part-time job thru the college years using) PDP-11s.

    Compared to the various dialects of unix, the VMS environment was so much friendlier and forgiving... I'm only now realizing how much my hands were in mittens using it. I'd still prefer a system that wasn't so case-sensitive.

    The chief engineers behind VMS then went to work at Micro$oft to develop NT, so some of the legacy is still there: expensive process starts, but a nice memory model to work with.

    Strengths:
    Linkers in the early 80s that were easy to cross languages in a single project
    A powerful set of run-time libraries, including some excellent flatfile databases
    A scripting language that had access to a nice library of "lexical" functions.

    But like I said, I wish I still cared. While we still have Alphas around running openVMS at the office, I haven't logged onto one for about three years. Somewhere, I have a huge library of shell routines, login scripts, and ancient forms-oriented code.

  • Oh Alpha, where art though? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by l33t-gu3lph1t3 ( 567059 ) <arch_angel16@NOspAM.hotmail.com> on Saturday February 01, 2003 @10:45PM (#5208259) Homepage
    Your first iteration was amazing. Your second version was equally amazing. AMD's own successes with the K7 architecture are owed mostly to you. Your latest golden baby was thrown in the garbage because it scared the other babies. Even though no one wants to know, your EV7 is *STILL* the premiere big iron architecture in this day and age. What would have been your crowning jewel was aborted and your womb replaced by something Intel Inside. EV8, you would've been an engineering and design marvel, something that would've taken YEARS to beat. And now, poor DEC Alpha team, where are you? Fragments of your EV7/6 team are higher-ups at AMD, giving the desktop underdog a chance, and the rest of you is at work at Intel/HP, genetically engineering something something truly EPIC, that sadly, only even a mother could love...assuming the mother eventually gives birth to acceptably talented offspring. Oh, whither art thou, Alpha?
    • I used to feel this way... until I bought a Multia. But I agree that all of the hype we're seeing today is about stuff that ALPHA did 10 years ago. It's a damn shame.

      Bruce

    • And when we're done bemoaning what happened to ALPHA, here's another to think about.

      Remember the iAPX 432? A message-passing architecture implemented in hardware, with every function living in its own privilege ring. You could do that machine right today. And you wouldn't have to use ADA to do it. Someone should make more new silicon in this direction. IA64 goes a little bit in this direction, but it's too easy for operating systems and compilers to not use its capabilities in the name of portability. With the '432, there was never any possibility of the OS running on anything else.

      Bruce

      • What ran on the iAPX432? You needed special software to properly use the silicon. This is one of the reasons that IA32 was improperly used for so long - most software chose the LCD way of running because it was simpler.

        With the original VAX architecture, there were four privilege rings. You had the usual user space and kernel space. You had exec space which was used by RMS (Record Management System) and allowed it to do complicated things like cross user buffer sychronisation, securely but outside the kernel. It was also used by some of the Digital database systems. The other mode, supervisor, was for the command intrepreter. VMS fully used all these special facilityies which made it non-trivial to port to other architecture (they tried initially to go to MIPS, but that failed).

  • Best part of VMS? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Smallest ( 26153 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @11:00PM (#5208328)
    automatic file versioning!

    if you have foo.txt and you save another foo.txt in the same directory, you get foo.txt;2 !

    damn, i wish Windows had that.

    -c

    • Re:Best part of VMS? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Ed Avis ( 5917 )
      Apparently Dave Cutler wanted to put the file versioning in NT as well, but Microsoft thought that Windows users wouldn't understand it. From a response [archive.org] he sent to the (now 404) 'Dave Cutler Fan Club':
      Versioning in the VMS file system was a great feature and one that I would have liked to brought forward into NT. However, it was so hard to sell a new file system at all and multiple versions of the same file, although managable by programmers, might not have been so manageable by PC Users.
      • Yeah but file versioning was from the file system (ODS) which was really Andy Goldstein's thing.

        Forget NT/XP, I want it back on Linux now - I really miss it, especially whenever I screw up. Of course I have no chance adding versioning to WInodws, but I know that someone could at least do that to Linux.

        Regrettably, I don't thin k it will happen. A lot of Unix people who briefly touched VMS looked upon this as an inconvenience. VMS had its problems compared to Unix, but this was't one of them.

    • Too difficult for PC users. They would forgot to put a limit to the number of versions, and fill the hard-disk without knowing why (because Explorer by default would only show them the latest version). Well, this is what happened to me when I was a VMS newbie around 15 years ago.

      Instead, try 'Versioning File System for Linux' on Google. You might hit some interesting link.

  • ...is for Itanium to run on FreeVMS [freevms.free.fr]!
  • At university, I only came near VMS under threat of force, because I have an invariant habit of typing 'ls' in any new login, screen, or xterm I see. This is fine in Unix, but in VMS it invokes Kafka's own editor, which has no known method of termination, not even convoluted emacs or vi compatability.
    • $ ls:== dir/brief
      in your login.com would fix that.

      Actually LS is an abreviation for LSE brings up Digital's Language Sentsitive Editor (LSE) which was based on TPU. TPU was like a much higher level EMACS largely programmed in its own language. LSE made programming very easy with builtin language and procedure call skeletons as well as excellent folding. LSE was quite expensive when originally distributed (you got TPU bundled) for non-educational users, so many people missed out on it.

  • The beauty of VMS (Score:4, Informative)

    by blair1q ( 305137 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @12:41AM (#5208688) Journal
    Let's ask fortune(6):

    One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX? Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines. And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s. It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming. With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference - - the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there.

    Ken Olsen, Chmn&CEO, DEC, 1984

    • Ken said: With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference - - the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there

      Having done much programming on both UNIX and VMS, I can say that this is completely true. VMS is much better documented. All parts fit together better, and the documentation is very clear. And VMS has more features that UNIX is missing, such as handling asynchronous event, doing parallell async I/O on dozens of disks simultaneously, scaling to thousands of network connections, etc. If you do some types of programming, UNIX certainly feels like a toy system. (It is becoming gradually better, though.)
  • Anyone know a web page that compares modern Unix to modern VMS? I already know the commands differ, but what really separates them? I know VMS is very stable and works quite well at what it does (whatever that is). My Debian boxes are extremely stable, too. Sorry for the newbie question, but the VAX was before my time.

  • OpenVMS boots. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Beave ( 519067 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @02:11AM (#5208988) Homepage
    I uses/run a public OpenVMS cluster. There are still somethings that the Unix community could learn from OpenVMS. Cluster, and the security model come to mind. The stablity cannot be beat. It's good stuff. And, yes.. You can run OpenVMS on your little Intel boxes.. Check out.. http://simh.trailing-edge.com/ .. Cool stuff. Run's great. If you're really interested in OpenVMS, there's a couple of "free access" servers out there. For example: http://deathrow.vistech.net .... One uVAX, and Alpha online for public use. We're about to add a SIMH (Intel) box running OpenVMS into the cluster as well.

  • They're even funding a port of GCC (Score:3, Informative)

    by guerby ( 49204 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @05:34AM (#5209420) Homepage
    ... by paying Ada Core Technologies [gnat.com] for it:

    Announcement on GNAT for ia64/OpenVMS [gnu.org] on 14Mar2002

    I wanted to let people on this list know that Ada Core Technologies has signed a contract with Compaq to implement GNAT on OpenVMS for ia64. We already have three ia64 machines in house, and are busy working on the initial step of bootstrapping the current version of GNAT on ia64.

    Robert Dewar

    This is great and it's the right thing to do!

    Laurent

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