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Happy 30th birthday, OpenVMS! It was 30 years ago today that VMS v1.0 shipped to the first paying customers on the VAX 11/780. Today, HP is shipping v8.3 on the third family of processors to support OpenVMS, the Intel Itanium, and continues to plan for future releases well into the future.
HP has created this special website to commemorate this anniversary. Pat Thibodeau of ComputerWorld has written another OpenVMS article, HP tries to assure OpenVMS users that OS still has a future that I was interviewed for, but I presume the outlook I expressed was too bland and too positive to be used to draw in readers.
I had just turned 20 and was still in college. I remember all the buzz in Kingsbury Hall at the time about the "new computer" that we were getting! (And I was curious why we would be losing 4 bits -- wasn't that a step backwards?) However, it would be another half dozen years before I got to touch my first VMS box, and that would be my own 11/750 at Boeing Flight Test, running VMS v3.4, IIRC.
So, happy birthday, OpenVMS. The first 30 are just the beginning!
In my work life, I manage a bunch of systems that all fall under the realm of our DSPP agreement. Every year, I download a new set of license PAKs (similar, but different, than the hobbyist PAKs). And every year, I have to tweak the file to ensure it doesn't trash any of our permanent licenses on any of the systems.
This year, I came up with a slightly more elegant way to accomplish this.
I've discovered that the DIRECTORY command does not properly parse the /EXCLUDE qualifier when interpreting a version number of ;0, instead returning "no files found". A minor nit, but one I've submitted to HP to get resolved.
Correcting this bug would allow you to easily see what files would be deleted with a PURGE command. I'll let you know what the response from HP is.
15-Aug-2007 09:57Commercial #5: the Steam Room Chat
Here’s the last of the 5 commercials DEC aired. Our hero’s now considered an integral part of the company and strategizes with another team member about the future in a health club steam room.
Thanks for watching, hope you enjoyed this view of the past!
Ah, the sweet smell of victory. It smells like … an overcrowded, shared office. Alas, our poor hero was too successful, so now the company is bringing in more just like him. But the boss is upbeat; after all, he had to share an office once, too…
I was interviewed last Friday (that’s pretty good turnaround, Pat!) and definitely commented on more than just the backwards compatibility, but I think Pat covered most, if not all, the points through comments by other folks.
And if you’ve not yet seen the videos from the Bunker of Doom, I highly recommend you visit there. The visualization of the attacks is telling!
Half way through the commercials, here our hero, the VAXserver, gets introduced to the crew he’s going to have to work with. His job, as it’s explained to the team, is to help everyone work together.
Here’s the next commercial in the series, wherein our hero arrives in the lobby for his first day at work, and runs into the office sycophant. Isn’t that the way it always goes???
Back in the early ‘90s, Digital took a tepid step into the world of TV advertising. This was not their first attempt, as anyone who’s seen “The Philadelphia Experiment” can attest. This series, instead of focusing on just one product, touted Digital’s integration abilities and showed off several products. The date on the VHS tape of this series is March 11, 1992.
This is commercial #1 of 5, where a company brings on a new team member: Digital. In this commercial, the big boss has a luncheon interview with the prospective hire.
Here’s a flash-back for you old DECcies… “Educating Peter”. The CGI in this video was hailed (at least within Digital) for having been rendered on a DECstation 5000, which then stood at the top of the RISC workstation performance wars.
HP's recently released video showcasing their computer systems' failover capability looks cool on the surface, but there's more (or is that less?) to the recovery time for OpenVMS than appears in this short video.
There is a notorious problem with the lexical f$getdvi. When you specify the argument item MountCnt, it returns the number of mounts on the current host, as opposed to the equivalent command Show Device which returns the number of mounts in a cluster.
While this will be fixed in OpenVMS v8.3-1, here's a little hack which will help you get around it now.
Now for the truth -- I'm fessing up here. The reasons this blog has been so quiet lately are multifold, one being my mother recently went in for open heart surgery (yes, she's recovering well) and another is that I just got a PS3. The latter is what spurred me on to joining the Folding@Home project.
A couple months back, there was quite a fracas on the OpenVMS SIG mailing list. Users were clamoring for info, and dribs and drabs were coming from Encompass and HP. Promises were made to keep the members informed of what was going on, but if you look back now, you'll see that not much was ever said.
A couple years ago, the government imposed changes to Daylight Stupid Time in a feeble attempt to dupe American citizens into thinking Congress was actually doing something about the devastation along our gulf coast caused by Katrina and the resultant gas shortages. These changes will make non-standard time the norm for 2/3rds of the year starting in March of this year. The new timezone rules have been implemented for OpenVMS 6.2, 7.3/7.3-2, 8.2/8.2-1, and 8.3.
10-Jan-2007 17:48Don't be caught with your license down.
Bee a lurt...
I'm back. Had a nice holiday break at the happiest place on Earth. A real nice holiday break, the crowds weren't bad at all, and the weather was magnificient. If you get a chance and like coasters, Expedition Everest is great!
But when I got back, I got to thinking about the expiring license PAK issue, and thought I'd post the one-liner I added to my Login.Com that gives me a nice little alert when I login, should my PAKs be about to expire.
Looks through the accounting file and finds all the failed batch jobs for user name ACCOUNT. I never noticed the /STATUS qualifier before and the "-" says match jobs that don't have this status. This can be combined with other qualifiers such as /SINCE.
Hi all, just a brief note to let you know that the server will be down for scheduled maintenance sometime this weekend. I've got to fix the government legislated idiocy where they want to change when we move the sun in the sky, that time called "Daylight Stupid Time". Sorry for any inconvenience -- write your congressman!
