VMS Software, the company migrating OpenVMS to x86 (well, virtualised x86, at least) has announced the release of OpenVMS 9.2-3, which brings with a number of new features and changes. It won’t surprise you to hear that many of the changes are about virtualisation and enterprise networking stuff, like adding passthrough support for fibre channel when running OpenVMS in VMware, a new VGA/keyboard-based guest console, automatic configuration of TCP/IP and OpenSSH during installation, improved performance for virtualised network interfaces on VMware and KVM, and much more.
Gaining access to OpenVMS requires requesting a community license, after which OpenVMs will be delivered in the form of a preinstalled virtual disk image, complete with a number of development tools.
OpenVMS had an insane uptime if I remember correctly.
OpenVMS was another magnificent beast from Dave Cutler.
Of course Open VMS is not “open”. Imagine if it had been made open source back in the late 90s when the writing was on the wall for DEC. It was more sophisticated and easier to use OS than ‘nix, or it was in the 80s when I used versions of both. Imagine a world where Apache was ported to VMS and it became the basis of the internet using Alpha servers. I got the below from an AI on VMS ease of use. I love the “up for years”. I never had a linux that didn’t break, It was like a law of nature.
– VMS had built-in support for clustering and load balancing since the early 1980s, making it easier to manage multiple machines.
– Creating and managing batch queues, print queues, and performing tape and disk backups was notably easy in VMS, even in earlier versions like VMS 4.2.
– VMS systems were known for their reliability and ability to stay up for years without reboots, whereas Unix systems often required monthly reboots to recover from memory leaks.
– VMS had built-in support for relative and indexed file types through its Record Management Services (RMS), which Unix lacked, making certain database operations more straightforward.
– The VMS command shell syntax was often considered more intuitive and consistent compared to the various Unix shells.
Iapx432,
I haven’t gotten to experience VMS. But when ti comes to unix and especially linux, it often feels like a lot of stuff just hacked together to solve specific problems at the time without a plan to engineer a more cohesive whole. For example look at TTY code and API, it’s just awful…not because TTY needs to be complex, but because it’s the result of so many accumulated hacks. Same deal with many of the subsystems. Plan9 tried to improve things, by then it was too late as *nix was the foundation for FOSS and GNU software.
Maybe VMS could have been a superior alternative, but there were no viable open source clones of it like unix and unix was already dominant for servers. You’re right that VMS would have needed more killer applications earlier. Also they would have needed to cut down the economic barriers for customers & developers. Hypothetically if they had opened up VMS early on it might have gained more popularity, but even in hindsight it’s hard to know if FOSS would have been a viable strategy for the company. A lot of open source projects need to be subsidized by a cash cow and I’m not certain if VMS had one. That’s the thing about FOSS, while the interest in it is clear, it remains difficult to build a sustainable business model around FOSS. I often look to Sun’s example, who were extremely innovative and willing to open source a lot of their tech. They contributed a great deal to us, but that didn’t save the company economically.
First released in 1978. Is this the oldest single OS (i.e. excluding forks) still being actively developed?