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How Big Is VMS?

(vmssoftware.com)
77 points rbanffy | 5 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. icedchai ◴[04 Apr 25 03:43 UTC] No.43578114[source]▶
Alpha was so far ahead, compared to the other mid 90’s “workstation” vendors. I went to a university with tons of DEC hardware, then worked at a mostly DEC shop for a bit. It’s a shame DEC died.
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2. LeFantome ◴[04 Apr 25 04:03 UTC] No.43578207[source]▶
I really loved the Alpha platform. It was not as fast as it felt like it should have been given the clock speed. It also seemed like a real memory pig compared to x86 at the time. That was probably just because it was 64 bit. Everything is a memory pig now I guess. :)

Alpha boxes were cool. High clock speeds, massive amounts of RAM does the time, and huge storage. When they were the only 64 bit systems, they were the only game in town for some workloads.

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3. brazzy ◴[04 Apr 25 06:20 UTC] No.43578886[source]▶
> It also seemed like a real memory pig compared to x86 at the time. That was probably just because it was 64 bit. Everything is a memory pig now I guess. :)

Wasn't Alpha also a fairly pure RISC architecture, with larger machine code being an inherent property of that?

4. sillywalk ◴[04 Apr 25 16:49 UTC] No.43584956[source]▶
> When they were the only 64 bit systems

They were never the only 64 bit systems. MIPS introduced their 64 bit R4000 in 1991, a year before the Alpha came out. Sun released the 64 bit UltraSPARC in '95, along with IBM's 64bit PowerPC AS for their AS/400 systems. HP released the 64bit version of their PA-RISC in 1996.

5. icedchai ◴[04 Apr 25 16:53 UTC] No.43585017[source]▶
In the late 90's, another engineer came up to me and said they had an Alpha with a couple gigs of RAM. That was almost unheard of for the time! My x86 laptop then had 32 megs. It's funny looking back at that now... Everything is a memory pig.