Wow, VMS just turned 30 and it (still) runs all sorts of important things… –
Gareth Williams, associate director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Minor Planet Center since 1990, has been tracking the 400,000 orbits of known asteroids and comets in the solar system using a cluster of 12 VAXes, from offices on the Harvard University campus. The Deutsche Börse stock exchange in Frankfurt runs on VMS. The Australian Stock Exchange runs on it. The train system in Ireland, Irish Rail, runs on it, as does the Amsterdam police department. The U.S. Postal Service runs its mail sorters on OpenVMS, and Amazon.com uses it to ship 112,000 packages a day. It has “a very loyal installed base of customers,” says Ann McQuaid, general manager of OpenVMS at HP, who shows no signs of wanting to give it up.
Happy birthday VMS, OS turns 30 years old – Link.
Ok makers, those of you still using VMS post in the comments, I know you’re out there.
12 thoughts on “Happy birthday VMS, OS turns 30 years old”
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That’s a Solaris Desktop, isn’t it?
Uhh, no, that’s CDE. It also ran on VMS.
You can tell it’s VMS by the terminal in the upper left corner. Since when do you do “SHOW USER” on Solaris?
Miss the VMS world, though. It was a great OS, and incredibly stable and secure. My college district still runs it for student records.
Ah, yes, SHOW USER. You could see information on processes and people logged in. Sometimes it would show NO PRIVILEGE in the user name. You could set your user name. I sometimes set mine to NO PRIVILEGE. (Why can’t I see his name?)
My application has sixteen independent programs that pass messages to each other to manage machine tool systems. This is about 1,500,000 lines of code. No way could this be done on a PC.
Checkout the OpenVMS projects at http://www.freevms.org
and
http://www.systella.fr/~bertrand/FreeVMS/indexGB.html
P.S. Every now and then I have had a problem pulling up the second URL.
Alpha 4000, we like to reboot it occasionally; say every 18 months or so. Tax collection, water bills, accounting, property assessing, payroll, fire dispatch, and I forget what else for a Massachusetts town of 35,000.
I’m home! I still use those tools daily here at Sun.
We are on Gnome, but can still run the VMS tools. w00t