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How Big Is VMS?

(vmssoftware.com)
77 points rbanffy | 2 comments | 03 Apr 25 18:46 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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snovymgodym ◴[03 Apr 25 23:41 UTC] No.43576777[source]▶
I have a morbid curiosity about this system, but I don't really have a charitable view of it.

The story as far as I know, goes like this

Back in the late 1970s Dave Cutler and his team create VMS at DEC as the next generation operating system for DEC's new flagship product, the VAX minicomputer.

VMS is good by all accounts and was a successful product, but Unix goes on to dominate the minicomputer and emerging server market for the next decade.

Then in the 1990s DEC goes out of business and sells VMS to Compaq, but not before porting it to their doomed Alpha CPU architecture.

Then in 2000s Compaq goes out of business and gets acquired by HP, and together they port VMS to the doomed Itanium CPU architecture.

In 2014, a shop called VMS Software Inc (VSI) strikes some kind of deal with HP where they get to develop and support new versions of VMS while older versions continue to belong to HP. As part of this, they finally announce an x86-64 port. This port first sees the light of day in 2020.

----

The story is essentially bad bet after bad bet, missing the boat and fighting the last war over and over again. And today, it's just a piece of legacy software being used to extract the last bits of value from the organizations that are stuck with it.

Even so, I hope for a true open source release of it one day.

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mepian ◴[04 Apr 25 00:56 UTC] No.43577247[source]▶
How was the Alpha a bad bet? x86-64 didn't exist yet, and the architecture was pretty solid technologically. It died because DEC died, not the other way around.
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1. nickpsecurity ◴[04 Apr 25 02:23 UTC] No.43577682[source]▶
More details about how it went down here:

https://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/compaq-to-aban...

ARM's and POWER's success suggests Alpha might have made it. Compaq wanted to partner on Itanium, though. Eventually, Intel got the Alpha I.P. rights which might as well have been a death sentence.

Last Alpha I saw was the SAFE architecture that added security features to a homebrew CPU that was derived from Alpha ISA. What I liked most on Alpha, though, was PALcode with its atomic execution.

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2. Spooky23 ◴[04 Apr 25 03:14 UTC] No.43577982[source]▶
Nah. It was a totally different world. These companies were competing around proprietary advantages at the OS or hardware level that became less and less relevant over time. HP self-immolated itself and you were left with IBM and Sun.

Only IBM survived, and that’s because it won key contracts in the 60s and 70s to run verticals and business systems, and essentially leveraged mainframe financing and legacy contracts to cross-sell everything. On the tech side, they parlayed that into a sustainable business by virtualizing everything and sharing the Power platform. They get some new business for AIX, but it’s mostly that legacy business.

A good chunk of DEC’s and Compaq’s Business was running terminal (as in tty) operations for mainframes. That went endangered with NT 3.5 and extinct with NT 4. As Linux improved, Intel was good enough. ARM is doing to Intel what Intel did to everyone.