22 Oct
2013
22 Oct
'13
8:36 a.m.
I was working as a VMS administrator up until 2 years ago.? The healthcare business still
has some VMS systems in use today.? The one I took care of ran the GE software for a well
known physicians group in San Francisco.? We called it IDX but it had been through many
names as GE tried to make it seem modern.? Based on one of the MUMPS variants.? A horrible
mess that was susceptible to unexplained problems at any moment.? Very expensive to run
since GE charged a lot for support and it needed a lot of it.??? Two years ago, the whole
IT departement got outsourced and the overseas staff, India, was supposed to take over.?
After a couple months of that I quit in disgust.? I do know one guy still doing VMS at an
HMO in Sacramento.? That'll go on for a couple more years.? My Alpha XP900 is sitting
unused in my garage.
22 Oct
22 Oct
9:24 a.m.
On 22 October 2013 13:36, James Gessling <jgessling at yahoo.com> wrote:
Interesting - thanks for that. Clearly not /quite/ dead yet, then.
A horrible mess that was susceptible to unexplained
problems at any moment.
Ha!
This is the best (i.e. worst) bad-software story I've read recently:
http://pythonsweetness.tumblr.com/post/64740079543/how-to-lose-172-222-a-se…
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884
9:37 a.m.
On 22 October 2013 14:24, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
On 22 October 2013 13:36, James Gessling <jgessling
at yahoo.com> wrote:
Interesting - thanks for that. Clearly not /quite/ dead yet, then.
I'm building an Integrity BL860c I2 with VMS 8.4 *right now* and I actively
look after 8 other BL860c I2's as well as several Alpha 4100s, ES40s, ES45s
etc. There's still a couple of VAXen out there too. The company I work for
has just been bought by a networking specialist, and the second they found
out we did OpenVMS they got quite excited.
It's obviously not full time since I'm a field engineer, but there's a lot
of kit still out there.
--
adrian/witchy
Owner of Binary Dinosaurs, the UK's biggest home computer collection?
www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk
10:58 a.m.
On Oct 22, 2013, at 9:37 AM, Adrian Graham wrote:
I'm building an Integrity BL860c I2 with VMS 8.4
*right now* and I actively
look after 8 other BL860c I2's as well as several Alpha 4100s, ES40s, ES45s
etc. There's still a couple of VAXen out there too. The company I work for
has just been bought by a networking specialist, and the second they found
out we did OpenVMS they got quite excited.
It's obviously not full time since I'm a field engineer, but there's a lot
of kit still out there.
There is. A lot of it is "hidden", because it's the stuff that the
world runs on that no one sees (particularly in the medical field,
but also in industrial control, etc.). There's been some rather
heated debate over that here in past years, and I don't really want
to revive that.
I think part of VMS' problem has been that their revenue model is
still assuming it's 1990 and everyone is buying new DEC machines
and the OS licenses to run them. VMS has NEVER been pushed hard
enough to gain traction in the larger marketplace, and DEC/Compaq/HP
have NEVER been interested in selling it to the larger marketplace,
because the support costs wouldn't even come close to making sense.
So you're left with a business that relies on support contracts, and
as free/less expensive OSes with much cheaper support costs begin to
take hold in the market, the revenue to support the OS dries up. I
don't know where it's headed at all, but I hope someone has a plan
to at least rescue the sources from HP before it's too late.
But yes, there are still plenty of VMS shops that will continue
using it until it becomes financially infeasible to do so. That
will be a long time, since HP has committed to support until 2020,
but unless they change their minds (not bloody likely), it's coming.
I'm particularly sad that they made the decision not to support the
Poulson processors, since that's the first iteration of the IA64
architecture that I actually found compelling, and I know I'm not
the only one.
- Dave
12:15 p.m.
On Tue, 22 Oct 2013, David Riley wrote:
But yes, there are still plenty of VMS shops that will
continue
using it until it becomes financially infeasible to do so. That
will be a long time, since HP has committed to support until 2020,
but unless they change their minds (not bloody likely), it's coming.
I'm particularly sad that they made the decision not to support the
Poulson processors, since that's the first iteration of the IA64
architecture that I actually found compelling, and I know I'm not
the only one.
I think we'll find VMS doing billable work for a long time similarly to
how PDPs are still found doing billable work. If anyone high up at HP has
any brains left, they'd find some way to open-source as much of VMS as
possible, preferably under a BSD-ish license.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
12:54 p.m.
If anyone high up at HP has any
brains left, they'd find some way to open-source as much of VMS as possible,
preferably under a BSD-ish license.
No, that would be a bad business decision. VMS is too far gone to make
any sort of comeback, especially with all the cheaper competitors (it
is hard to compete with free!). If anyone has any brains left at HP,
they should be milking VMS for as much as they can until 2020.
You do not kill a cash cow - even a tiny cash cow.
It would be nice if HP let VMS completely loose after 2020, however.
--
Will
1:24 p.m.
On Oct 22, 2013, at 12:54 PM, William Donzelli wrote:
That was actually how I interpreted what Dave was saying. That
makes at least SOME business sense, as long as there aren't
parts of VMS which are required to be kept confidential in
perpetuity, which wouldn't totally surprise me (especially
given how popular it is for DoD).
- Dave
If anyone high
up at HP has any
brains left, they'd find some way to open-source as much of VMS as possible,
preferably under a BSD-ish license.
No, that would be a bad business decision. VMS is too far gone to make
any sort of comeback, especially with all the cheaper competitors (it
is hard to compete with free!). If anyone has any brains left at HP,
they should be milking VMS for as much as they can until 2020.
You do not kill a cash cow - even a tiny cash cow.
It would be nice if HP let VMS completely loose after 2020, however. 
4:55 p.m.
It would be
nice if HP let VMS completely loose after 2020, however.
That was actually how I
interpreted what Dave was saying. That makes
at least SOME business sense, as long as there aren't parts of VMS
which are required to be kept confidential in perpetuity, which
wouldn't totally surprise me (especially given how popular it is for
DoD).
5:11 p.m.
On 22 October 2013 21:55, Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org> wrote:
Even if there are, I think it would make sense to
release what they
can, even if it doesn't quite make a whole system.
Cf BSD 4.4Lite.
I always wished IBM had done that with Workplace OS/2.
Real x86 OS/2, I understand - there's a lot of Microsoft code in
there. But the Workplace version with Unix underneath had to be less
encumbered, surely...
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884
10:42 p.m.
On Oct 22, 2013, at 2:11 PM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
On 22 October 2013 21:55, Mouse <mouse at
rodents-montreal.org> wrote:
It was completely unencumbered. Everything was pretty much written from scratch.
Even though the kernel proper started from Mach 3.0, by the time it was folded up the
code looked almost nothing like what came from CMU.
TTFN - Guy
Even if there are, I think it would make sense to
release what they
can, even if it doesn't quite make a whole system.
Cf BSD 4.4Lite.
I always wished IBM had done that with Workplace OS/2.
Real x86 OS/2, I understand - there's a lot of Microsoft code in
there. But the Workplace version with Unix underneath had to be less
encumbered, surely...
1:22 p.m.
On Oct 22, 2013, at 12:15 PM, David Griffith wrote:
On Tue, 22 Oct 2013, David Riley wrote:
That's an awfully big "if". They've outsourced most/all of their
VMS development and support to India, and reports I've heard are
not favorable about the performance of that group. HP has even
less idea of what to do with VMS than Compaq did; the OpenVMS
discussion group on LinkedIn (which is actually a pretty decent
bunch) had a thread a while back about trying to do a new
commercial installation of VMS and the terrible time they had
trying to get in touch with anyone at HP who even knew what
OpenVMS WAS. The end verdict was that the resellers and third-
party VMS service firms do the real support for HP, which means
that HP seldom sees a dime from it. The widespread perception
is that the only reason HP has supported it as long as it has
is because of government contracts; this is also suspected to
be the rationale behind the 2020 support commitment.
I don't generally like to be a downer, but I'm really not very
optimistic about the prospects of OpenVMS for the future, at
least as a non-vintage OS. It has a very enthusiastic group of
core supporters (Ian Miller, Sue Skonetski, etc) who have the
Sisyphean jobs of "VMS Evangelists" at HP, and the Hobbyist
program is very well run, so there is some hope that there are
enough people to convince HP management to Do The Right Thing,
even if it's a remote possibility.
- Dave
But yes, there are still plenty of VMS shops that
will continue
using it until it becomes financially infeasible to do so. That
will be a long time, since HP has committed to support until 2020,
but unless they change their minds (not bloody likely), it's coming.
I'm particularly sad that they made the decision not to support the
Poulson processors, since that's the first iteration of the IA64
architecture that I actually found compelling, and I know I'm not
the only one.
I think we'll find VMS doing billable work for a long time similarly to how PDPs are
still found doing billable work. If anyone high up at HP has any brains left, they'd
find some way to open-source as much of VMS as possible, preferably under a BSD-ish
license.
3925
days inactive
3926
days old
10 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
-
binarydinosaurs＠gmail.com -
dgriffi＠cs.csubak.edu -
fraveydank＠gmail.com -
ggs＠shiresoft.com -
jgessling＠yahoo.com -
lproven＠gmail.com -
mouse＠Rodents-Montreal.ORG -
wdonzelli＠gmail.com