How Big Is VMS?

Is there any reason to use VMS today other than for existing applications that cannot be migrated? I've heard its reliability is legendary, but I've never tried it myself. The 1 year licensed VM seems excessively annoying. Is it just old and esoteric, or does it still have practical use? At least with Linux, multiple vendors release and support distros and it is mainstream, whereas with VMS, you'd be stuck with VSI.

I was actually surprised to see that there's been a release in the last 12 months - I had thought it was dead.

I used it extensively in the late 90's early 00's and really liked it. As a newb sysadmin at the time, the built-in versioning on the fs saved me from more than one self-inflicted fsck up.

I can't imagine there would be any green-field deployments in the last 10 years or so - I'm guessing it's just supporting legacy environments.

MCP and MVS (now called z/OS) are all still supported. Not sure whether MCP still receives updates though.

> Not sure whether MCP still receives updates though.

MCP Release 21 came out in mid-2023, and release 22 is supposed to be out middle of this year, with further releases planned: https://www.unisys.com/siteassets/microsites/clearpath-futur...

Looking at new features, they seem to be mainly around security (code signing, post quantum crypto) and improved support for running in cloud environments (with the physical mainframe CPU replaced by a software emulator)

Unisys’ other mainframe platform, OS 2200 is still around too, and seems to follow a similar release schedule - https://www.unisys.com/siteassets/microsites/clearpath-futur... - although I get the impression there are more MCP sites remaining than OS 2200 sites?

Would you happen to know where developers who want to integrate against MCP and OS 2200 running on a variety of hardware and OS versions (compile targets for validation and distribution, really) can lease time from?