Anders Østergård writes “According to this newsgroup message, the OpenVMS OS (former DEC, now owned by Compaq) is now able to boot and operate on Intel’s 64-bit Itanium-platform. OpenVMS was originally developed for the legendary VAX-architecture and has evolved for into a stable but anonymous OS for more than 25 years.”
First OpenVMS boot on IA-64
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OpenVMS OS (former DEC, now owned by Compaq)
And now owned by HP
If anyone is interrested in trying out OpenVMS, you can get a shell account at:
http://deathrow.vistech.net/
Can anyone post a brief summary about how OpenVMS is different from KDE or Gnome or even Windows 2000? What makes it interesting in your opinion?
Please don’t compare to XP as I don’t know it.
Thanks.
VMS is a special system, google is your friend
OpenVMS is not a window manager, nor is it a desktop operating system, they CANT be compared like that. You could compare OpenVMS to Windows2000 Advanced Server, but thats about it. I dont know much about it, so i’ll stop there.
I haven’t been able to find anything on what kind of GUI (if any) VMS has. Does it use X? Something similar? Anybody have any links?
Various X Windows utilities are available for DECwindows. DECwindows
is an implementation of the X Windows environment and libraries,
and provides various libraries, and provides various desktop interfaces,
including COE, Motif, and XUI.
It runs Mozilla and XEphem and xpdf and a lot of other X apps. Runs a lot of “UNIX apps” in fact. The window manager is CDE.
Ah. I was kinda hoping it had some funky-looking proprietary GUI system
Anonymous > VMS is a special system, google is your friend
Thx. I really forgot momentarily about Google directories… Now, if someone asks you about the weather, don’t send them to Google, ok? Mainly in case it’s a girl… ;-P
Richard> You could compare OpenVMS to Windows2000 Advanced Server, but thats about it. I dont know much about it, so i’ll stop there.
Even so, someone probably will make a GUI interface. It’s trendy in these times we live.
Manik> It runs Mozilla and XEphem and xpdf and a lot of other X apps. Runs a lot of “UNIX apps” in fact. The window manager is CDE.
Ok, I got the idea. Thank you all.
Even so, someone probably will make a GUI interface. It’s trendy in these times we live.
My MicroVAX from the late eighties runs DECwindows and Motif. The X Windowing System first saw the light of day on the VAX architecture, IIRC. The GUI and VMS go a long way back.
Yes, I know Compaq is owned by Hewlett-Packard. I must’ve forgot.
VMS was originally – just like Unix – born with no graphical user interface. Beautiful as simplicity is, VMS is represented with just a command line. Noting else. Later, graphical systems have been released, but I’ve never tried them.
Can anyone post a brief summary about how OpenVMS is different from KDE or Gnome or even Windows 2000? What makes it interesting in your opinion?
KDE and Gnome are not operating systems! They’re GUIs for many different (essentially Unix-based) platforms. Windows 2000 is actually more comparable – but then again, the idea and development of these two systems are completely different.
Regards
—
Anders
I had a VMS account at university for a semester. If a free x86 port existed I would love run it. There are a couple of projects, eg. http://freevms.free.fr/indexGB.html , in their infancy. This one: http://www.freevms.org/ wants to start with a FreeBSD kernel.
This may be of use to some:
http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?query=vms
I have worked 11 years managing databases on VMS and I loved this OS : contrarily to Unix (which I love too, BTW), the commands all follow the same syntax, which is very elegant (and simple to memorize). I missed the Unix redirection and pipes however, even if you could end most commands with a /output=file and work with the file in question afterwards.
In addition, it was rock stable !
I remember my days working on a MicroVAX II ages ago very fondly. DCL (Digital Command Language) was just so slick and sensibly designed, worlds away from the UNIX shell (I hope MSFT’s new .NET shell technology ‘borrows’ heavily from DCL – I guess we’ll see what Dave Cutler does here).
Everything about Digital’s products back then was just excellent in terms of quality – hardware, software, even their manuals and documentation, IIRC. I would love to see OpenVMS’ market share grow as a result of the Itanium port – it is a really fine system.
Here is a site with lots of content all about OpenVMS:
http://www.openvms.org
Detailed profile of OpenVMS here, for those of you who don’t know what it is:
http://www.osdata.com/oses/vms.htm
How long does it take to port Linux or NetBSD to a new platform?? Not _that_ long, really!
According to German news-service heise online (www.heise.de), HP is working on the OpenVMS port for *more than a year*!
And the only thing they got working is a f***ing DIR command!!!
Honestly, I think this is an utter shame and sounds a bit like (probably) Microsofts ’90s development system:
does it boot? no? ok, change 2 lines and recompile.
does it boot? great! submit it as first milestone reached!!
Really, this isn’t _development_ they do at HP, is it?
Sounds more like A-Zillion-Monkeys…
Hey, did anybody mention security model of VMS??
Although there’s no such thing as unbreakable OS this one
get pretty close to this definition.
I hope they will port it to http://www.x86-64.org
There is the fun ..
No, they won’t. HP have been hell-bent on crossing over to the new Intel since years, co-developing the processor as well as scrapping its PA-RISC in the process.