“Various analysts report and company insiders reckon that HP earns an estimated $400M USD per year in profit on the OpenVMS operating system, which is one of the most robust and disaster-tolerant OSes on the market. For example, it’s used to build the Intel chips it hopefully will run on, some day. So why is it being given short shrift in favor of Windows, Linux and HP-UX and the mythical–and nearly impossible to actually implement–Consolidated Enterprise Unix?” Read the mini-article at TheInquirer.
Why Isn’t HP Promoting OpenVMS?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
HP is a market follower, not a market leader. They don’t know how to lead an industry anymore.
If HP were a leader, you’d find a lot more attention on Alpha-based computers, OpenVMS, Tru64 UNIX, and other time-tested excellent technologies.
However, HP has surrendered leadership to Intel and IBM. HP is content to let Intel dictate the future of computing platforms and then plays constant catch up with IBM in the business world.
HP’s last leadership business was the Laserjet. But that was long ago.
Is there anyone in HP managemenent who is not a merger/acquisition specialist or a bean counter? Nope.
HP is no longer a technology-centric company. They will coast along on the strength of their accounting department from now on.
Haha, Eugenia, I think you should un-moderate that first comment. It’s pretty funny. I can’t tell if they were joking or not, but it’s pretty hilarious:
Is OpenVMS ready for the desktop? Do they have GUI config tools, an office suite, etc?
(For those of you who don’t know: a resounding NO, I don’t even think it has a GUI.)
> I think you should un-moderate that first comment. It’s pretty funny
No it is not, anymore. Not after this same person does the SAME comment over and over when we have stories about such OSes. The guy is just sarcastic, and he deserves the moderation. The first time, is funny. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4rth, it is not. It is just trolling after the first “funny” time.
“Is OpenVMS ready for the desktop? Do they have GUI config tools, an office suite, etc?
(For those of you who don’t know: a resounding NO, I don’t even think it has a GUI.)”
VMS was never really intended for the desktop. But it does have a GUI (DECWindows), it even runs mozilla if so you desire (desktop tasks). And yeah they also have GUI config tools (OpenVMS station, that you can run from any remote computer). In any case this is an enterprise level system, not something for people with minimal computer skillz…. (i.e. you)
> not something for people with minimal computer skillz…. (i.e. you)
Please be careful how you talk about people you don’t know in real life (in this case, Stephen). Let’s make this place a nice discussion place, and not flaming, ok?
I am trying hard to keep this place nice and clean, so please everyone, discuss nicely and intelligently. Thank you.
We just replaced all of our EMC drives with really nice HP drives. All fiber. The nice thing about the HP drives is you can plug in new drives of any size and they all work together. The EMCs all had to be the same size.
We now have a few racks of 18 gig EMCs that are sitting in the corner waiting to be bought.
No, Eugenia, he’s right. How can I have computer skills if I don’t even spell “skills” with a z?
@javi: I didn’t think it did…hence the word “think” in what I said. Thanks for enlightening me, but next time try not to be a smart-ass about it.
You said:
“For those of you who don’t know: a resounding NO”
No GUI? Well it does have a gui: DECWindows. In fact it supports X-windows pretty well out of the box. And they do have gui config tools, you can administer users, devices, etc from you very own desktop. Or a windows terminal too…. although the system does require a bit of a learning curve.
No Office Apps? Well it does support All-in-1 pretty well, it was one of the original office suites out there, you know. Many business still rely on it for word processing/email/groupware. May not be the fanciest one, but it does have office applications.
And no, it is not about the spelling of skillz… I have actually used this OS (heck I am running it at home right now!). Clearly it is not a system for the desktop or the faint of heart, so it is a moot point trying to make VMS something that it is not. And I apologize if I sounded a bit too brash, but please do not be so condescending when talking about a subject that you were less than minimally informed about.
I seem to think that I remember a long time ago to have read that David Cutler while still at DEC asked for $150 mill to develop a next generation of OpenVMS – for the PC (on DEC’s Alpha). It was turned down (by founder and CEO Kenneth Olsen). Cutler subquently went to MS as lead developer of what became WNT. Who knows what computing would be like today had the answer been yes.
OpenVMS has some excellent features such as structured error handling, structured shell (DCL), logical names (compare symlinks), structured documentation in addition to being real rock solid. See book “OpenVMS AXP Internals and Data Structures” if interested. Nowadays, the filesystem could need some work – not good for lots of small files. DECWindows is standard X-Window adapted for OpenVMS. The window manager is CDE as also used by Unix.
>We just replaced all of our EMC drives with really nice HP
>drives. All fiber. The nice thing about the HP drives is
>you can plug in new drives of any size and they all work
>together. The EMCs all had to be the same size.
Hope it wasnt a “Virtual Array”… because thats a dead product according to my HP sources… shoulda stuck with EMC … If not Symmetrix, then at least the new Clariion CX series..
HP has a horrible history of going from one storage product to another… we are huge HPUX shop, and I/we have used everyting they have ever tried to sell, from Nike’s, to Jamacia’s, to Autoraids, to FC60’s etc.. I got tired of HP’s meandering storage directions.. they don’t make a single peice of storage technology now.. they real autoraid is the last thing they ever made themselves.. the FC60 (I like to call it “FSheet 60”), and the virtual array are just low end products from LSI Logic they try to make seem like they are enterprise quality.
BTW, FYI.. you can put 36, 72, and 146 GB drives in the Symmetrix.
Well I can’t say about OpenVMS but I used VMS for a 4 years on a desktop. I mean the VT100 terminals did sit on my desktop 1 or 2 of em.
Well people did (& I presume some still) have office apps of a sort.
Tex, nroff, troff, never used any of those, ned was enough for me.
There must have been thousands of other apps too, but not as pretty as today.
As for graphics, it had that too, either graphical ascii coding on the terminals or whatever you programmed on some connected graphics HW, color resolution was amazing then 512.512 or so.
It had most of the things we felt were needed for computing, we had Vaxen/VMS to replace a tired old PDP11-40 running some wierd OS called Unix. Times change.
As for Intel, they could surely write, acquire, or run some emulator to port their apps.
Wish all the bean counter to get laid off, I really do, Carly 1st.
>> Hope it wasnt a “Virtual Array”… because thats a dead product according to my HP sources…
Does it matter? We have a three year contract and the support thus far has been great. The drives are fast and reliable.
We (meaning the company I work for) might switch back to EMC in three years. The cost of support, not the actual drives are what we pay for. When the EMC drives were put to the side EMC told us to throw them away – this is racks of drives about 6 feet tall. The drives themselves are useless without the support.
Why hasn’t anyone tried to create an opensource version of OpenVMS since it’s such a solid and reliable OS?
HP has a lot of technology which they try to keep a secret. They also have NonStop Himalaya range, running the NSK (formerly Tandem). It’s the best of the best but Compaq already tried to keep this a secret and HP seems to do the same.
There is an Open Source initiative at http://freevms.free.fr/indexGB.html and an implementation of DCL for Linux at http://www.accelr8.com/dcll.html.
I am not aware of this OS but I know VMS is the basis of WinNT as far as I have read. Where can I get more info of what VMS and now OpenVMS is and what it does? The OpenVMS site looks to commercial to me http://www.openvms.org/ I know this may be a stupid question but is OpenVMS a commercial OS, also does it have a GUI, how does the thing look? I will have to do some searching on Google if I don’t get an answer in here.
In the above comment, “to commercial” is suppose to be “too commercial”
I’ve been working for the last years predominantly on OpenVMS 7.1/7.2 and Tru64 5.1
Besides, that both systems are rock solid, being hammered by numerous developers and testers 24/7 never giving a fault, my personal perception is that Tru64 is more advanced,tuned and responsive comparing to VMS (running on the same alpha boxes).
VMS contains too many idiosyncrasies:
– unflexible file path with different delimiters for hosts,disks,directories,files.
– capitals everywhere. The system just SHOUTS at you all the time
from the developer’s perspective:
– mmsg/mms building approach is cumbersome
– .EXE extenstion for both dynamic libraries and executables is misleading
– all external symbols must be resolved during compilation and not only linkage (could not create circular dependant libraries)
– DCL command line arguments are well notorious
Tru64 was always like a fresh air after dusty dungeons of the VMS peculiarities.
In the long shot, I would really love to see Tru64 to stay, but alas, HP decided to scrap this system and move VMS to intel. And I think I heard that US army has a huge contract for Tru64 clusters. I believe that VMS installation base is much much wider than Tru64, that is probably the reason.
P.S. These are my personal opinions only and not to be trusted
Well, if you’re so despirate to get rid of them, I’ll buy the rack for a few hundred.
I had never heard about that Accelr8 OpenDCL product before (it also runs on NT and IRIX, among other things – do check it out). Accelr8’s stuff looks fabulous and this find has definitely made my day.
Since it is a freeware download, I am going to put it on my XP box and then I will have DCL. NT returns home at last 🙂
Here are the correct links for Open DCL:
Open DCL
http://www.accelr8.com/dcl.html
Open DCL (Free) Downloads
http://www.accelr8.com/dcll.html
Sector 7 VX/DCL
http://www.sector7.com/sector7_openvms_migration/vxdcl.htm
OpenVMS is VMS (yes it is a commercial OS) there is no difference, Digital just changed the name for marketing reasons. I’ve forgotten the exact reason for calling it “Open” (nothing to do with open source at all) but if you look around the net you can find out. If you want to actually use OpenVMS you can tryout the Death Row OpenVMS cluster http://deathrow.vistech.net on the net (for non-commercial use only) which you can log on to anonymously by ssh or telnet or get an account. If you try it, first thing you should do when you log on is use the help facility by typing “help”… you WON’T get far with out it.
I think that they are looking for a bit more than that. Yes, they are useless to us, but they are not taking up space we need.
Plus, I think they might have a buyer.
Anon, I think that Digital changed the name from ‘VMS’ to ‘OpenVMS’ when it first became fully POSIX compliant.
Not sure about this though.
Yes, that was the reason… it completely slipped my mind, thanks.
VMS originally was written in assembler for the VAX architecture. This make it difficult for DEC to expand onto different hardware in the 80’s, and combinded with Ken Olsen’s reluctance to support unix, was probably the cause of the fall of DEC. DEC first tried to make a C version of VMS, which “opened” up the OS to different hardware. This was originally intended for such things as the MIPS RISC processors and maybe the SPARC chips. The intel 386 chips were still too slow at that time to think about using, but intel also had the i860 which was a workstation class RISC chip that had some possibilities. DEC even sold a few workstations based on the MIPS R1000, R1500, and R2000 chips. Then SGI bought MIPS, and that moved the various workstations vendors away from using it to avoid being dependend on a competitor. Meanwhile, DEC finally finished the design of its ALPHA chip (several years too late to make an impact), so DEC ported the open VMS and Digital Unix operating systems to it, but that was before it collapsed and was bought out by Compac (which later was bought out by HP, of course). DEC also lost some of its engineers to, among other companies, Microsoft, which then went on to incorporate VMS technology into Windows NT and its successors.
OpenVMS was supposted to have been DECs commercial operating system software what would run on a wide variety of chips and hardware. Windows NT was similar in its goals, at one time it ran on MIPS, Intel, Alpha, PowerPC, and SPARC machines; now they have pretty much retreated back into the most profitable, and lowest-performing, hardware line (Intel x86).
DEC was one of my favorite companies in the early 80’s, but Ken Olsen simply refused to look into the future, past the VAX hardware or past VMS for software, until it was too late.
Thanks for that
I appreciate it.
IIRC, OpenVMS/VMS was written in a combination of Macro and Bliss which gave it the security edge over other operating systems which were written in C.
“… based on the MIPS R1000, R1500…”
Hum, interesting… I thought the first MIPS (commercial) CPU was the R2000 (and the R2010/20 chipsets). Never heard of the R1000/1500, do you have any more info on those chips? I am very curious…
In all fairness to HP it was Dec and then Compaq that really made this choice. Digital had some execs who were huge NT fans and others that were simply terrified of going head to head with Microsoft when Microsoft announced their “enterprise strategy” in the mid 90’s. But even still:
a) VMS had features that no other OS had
b) VMS had a very loyal following
c) Alpha was an excellent chip, far and away the best chip for your money on the 64 bit market.
When Compaq bought Digital there was still time to save VMS. Moronic comments from Compaq execs about how VMS users should switch to NT destroyed confidence in VMS as a product. Worse yet Compaq seemed to believe this. Compaq was always a PC company which did light technological development which as a result of the digital buyout now had real technologies to handle, and they did a terrible job.
At this point it is too late for HP to do much to salvage VMS. VMS still has better clustering than any other OS. Other than that its hard to think of many areas that its ahead in. I guess the biggest service HP could do for users would be to create a really good ports of lots of open source software.
________
A few comments about the above
BTW VMS is mostly open source. You can get most of the source code for it. It isn’t “free” however the hobbiest license is very restrictive and the commercial license is expensive.
Yes the “open” in OpenVMS refers to Open standards (Posix).
For those of you who’ve never tried VMS this is a list from the Unix haters handbook regarding what they missed in VMS
http://www.mindspring.com/~blackhart/I_Miss_VMS.html
Is a kind of fun article from a VMS user a little less than 10 years ago complaining about Unix relative to VMS.
http://www.mindspring.com/~blackhart/requium.html
BTW to all the NT users who talk about (one shell / one GUI), no complex commands, people not wanting to compile software… as killing Linux; as you can see 10 years ago the VMS guys said the same things about Unix and well history shows what happened.
I don’t know if there were any R1000 or R1500, but at least they weren’t used in DECstations (as DEC’s first RISC workstation line was called). The DECstation 2100 and 3100, which were the first ones out, both used R2000s, running respectively at 12 and 16 MHz. The last MIPS chip to be used by DEC was the R4000 or R4400, IIRC.
VMS contains too many idiosyncrasies:
– unflexible file path with different delimiters for hosts,disks,directories,files.
– capitals everywhere. The system just SHOUTS at you all the time
from the developer’s perspective:
– mmsg/mms building approach is cumbersome
– .EXE extenstion for both dynamic libraries and executables is misleading
– all external symbols must be resolved during compilation and not only linkage (could not create circular dependant libraries)
– DCL command line arguments are well notorious
As a non-programmer, I find the DEC approach to be a lot more workable than the UNIX one. I can’t comment on the inner workings or how easy it is to program, but the user experience is just much better than UNIX. I really wish Torvalds would have made LMS instead of Linux.
The DCL command line is the most perfect command line I’ve ever seen. It’s not line noise like UNIX, it’s broken English. That’s user friendly.
Granted the insistence on file suffixes is stupid, but I’d never claim VMS to be perfect in every regard.
And while it is slower than UNIX, it is due to systems such as VMS that UNIX is called small and efficient.
I’m wondering, what is exactly the purpose of OpenVMS? I think we’ve suffeciently established that it is not a desktop OS nor will it ever be, so I have to ask: what is it? High-end workstation (and if so, graphics, engineering, what?)? Server (and if so, web, e-mail, file, what?)?
I’m wondering, what is exactly the purpose of OpenVMS? I think we’ve suffeciently established that it is not a desktop OS nor will it ever be, so I have to ask: what is it? High-end workstation (and if so, graphics, engineering, what?)? Server (and if so, web, e-mail, file, what?)?
Its a minicomputer operating system. Basically it was originally designed as an inexpensive replacement for the IBM mainframee (zSeries). It offers less features but does not require the same expense and skill to manage. So it is a real enterprise enterprise system, that is an OS that really is designed to support hundreds – thousands of workers doing a wide range of tasks that need to coordinate them in a cost effecient and reasonable manner. The sort of system (had development not slowed) that corporate America should be using instead of NT.
Its a compromise. For example lets take printing.
NT printing basically works on the user sends doc X to printer Y model. It has very little support for regularly reoccruing print jobs, complex distributions, commercial printing….
zOS has a very complex print system called PFS which assumes a professional operations staff handeling output production. You have complex queues, electronic flash forms being dynamically loaded into print servers, bundle distribution, print on completion (i.e. I can request A & Bs document bound together and when they are both finished a copy of the joined document gets sent to me automatically)…
VMS takes a compromise position. It has the queues and light form handeling of zOS. On the other hand it does the printer interface itself and allows for very easy setup. The result is you could use VMS to drive a few desktop printers or have it send documents to a commercial print shop. On the other hand graphics are a property of the document, enterprise flash forms management is not built into the print subsystem.
Unix BTW is essentially similar to NT, which is one of the reason I’m not a huge supporter of Unix for the emterprise either. The one advantage Unix has is because “everything is an ascii stream of text” its fairly easy to bolt a complex print solution on top of Unix and solve at least 1/2 the problems. With NT you are basically SOL.
Anyway I could give you more examples: like application compliation but again its sort of a compromise.
theinquirer has posted a followup at http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=8222
Let’s not forget VMS error messages; god I miss them in *nix. Well formatted and easy to understand. You are in no doubt if it is fatal, a warning or other… And if want to pull a prank you can edit them as well. And of course VMS clustering quite simply rocks.