This is actually very cool. Shame it isn't open-source so I personally would not recommend committing to it. Still fun to play with however!

I wrote quite a few thousand lines of Ada on VAX/VMS 5.5 and 6. I also ran a few machines for several years before moving to SunOS, Solaris, and Linux. I wonder how many people would know how to stop the print queue without losing the in progress job. Not that I want to go back to that job.

I started my career as a VMS operator. Can't remember a blasted thing about it these days though. I'd be totally lost without a comprehensive manual now.

The only thing I still remember about VMS is the in-build versioning and that it had a database-based filesystem.

That clustering though, that sounds tailor-made for a cloudy upstart.

The one thing I remember is that it had plenty of comprehensive manuals. By the shelffull, or even the roomful. Documentation galore. There must have been a impressive team churning out and updating all that documentation.

As an ex-Deccie I often wondered whether DEC was really a publishing business that sold computers as as side line.

Back in the day I asked one of our Dectites (the DuPont name for those brave unfortunate souls) a technical question and he referred me, with some reverence I might add, to the VAX/VMS documentation library holding forth in its own vast storeroom. Had to supply my own breadcrumbs to find my way back. Never did find the answer.

As an end-user and writer of DCL files? Still a lot, let me get back to using F$PARSE functions.

As an administrator? I'd need a crash course.

I wonder if the Whitesmith C compiler is still available? And of course I'd have to search down all those ZOO archives.

As an administrator?

I'm one. Although the systems are slated to be phased out, but that should have been over with six years ago already.

The main sticking point is that a lot of the programs that were running on them were written in Pascal, and the pool of competent developers with the right domain knowledge was getting rather dry. So stuff was rewritten in C on Linux, or turned into whatever it is that you feed into WebLogic or JBoss.

Oh well. Less than five years to retirement.

Verbosely Meaningful Syntax.

I used VMS (on VAXes) for about 4 years as a user. The one real benefit I remember from that use in the late 80s was how meaningful the commands were. The disadvantage - lots of typing due to the verbosity of the CLI.

You could abbreviate any cli word to its lowest unique form and, at least in the early days, everything was guaranteed to be OK down to 4 letters. No need to type "directory" when "dir" sufficed.

DCL was (in part) intended to unify the CLI across the various DEC operating systems.

There was also a DCL command interpreter for RSX-11 (amongst other earlier OSes) that was basically just a massive macroprocessor that consumed DCL and produced MCR commands.

dir was actually more succinct (and indeed meaningful) than pip /li but it came at the cost of some very heavy string processing!

It would be really nifty if this ran on s390x. VMS was one of the most credible competitors to z/OS, and the sophisticated clustering would be a fantastic option for the mainframe crowd.

Given that clustering first showed up in 1984 - the same year as the first Apple Macintosh - it was pretty remarkable for its era. I'd argue that the technology presaged the notion of cloud computing given the way processes could be migrated from failing nodes and capacity added and removed as required.

It was also an important example of system design rather than simple hardware or software design: the early versions depended on both on the CI (Computer Interconnect) hardware and the operating system support.

Having spent a chunk of my early career working on both RSX and VMS I admit to some nostalgia, but they are little more now than evolutionary curiosities in their specific implementations. Many of the concepts they spawned, though, remain incredibly relevant, even 40ish years later.

It was also an important example of system design rather than simple hardware or software design: the early versions depended on both on the CI (Computer Interconnect) hardware and the operating system support.

I agree. The OS and VAX hardware were mutually co-dependent in a good way. They had a vision including the clustering that would have lasted decades....if only Sun had not killed VAX with SPARC performance.

That was one of the big holes in the VAX/VMS plan: CISC including ridiculous instructions like MOVC5 and SOBGEQ. Compiler writers couldn't use them. Ordinary C code would outperform them.

CRC calculated an arbitrary cyclic redundancy code. It was in firmware for most implementations, except the MicroVAX II implemented it by an instruction exception branching to software emulation. So the backup utility which did CRCs on tape blocks was terribly slow. A hand-built code was quicker.

I think it was VMS 5.3 or 5.4 where the CRC in the backup utility was finally replaced with hand-tuned code.

The Alpha was a big improvement on CPU performance, but it was late to the party.

And DEC / Compaq marketing could never let go of their "big iron" vision despite ordinary workstations matching the CPU power of the big boxes. They couldn't admit they would make more money selling 100k or a million workstations instead of a few thousand servers.

Started working on OpenVMS way way back in 1990 - still the best OS IMO & I have worked & continue to work on many. No OS even now has the features that were available back in the 80's, Linux/Unix clustering products - MEH! Shared storage - nothing has a patch on it, stability - nothing now is a rock solid apart from mainframes.

Perhaps current OS (& cloud) vendors should take a look & what VMS can do instead of adding hard to support bells & whistles with 40 min fail over times for hosted VMs.

It was rock solid. Had a wonderful versioning file system. Multi-level hardware protection.

I loved DCL and the very rich set of process variables. I even enjoyed TPU and EVE - trying to parlay it into it into a real IDE.

What a pity the DEC was sabotaged. Not sure by whom. But VMS still lives on in the innards of Windows NT....

Decnet, LAT, Pathworks, batch queues, autogen, Clustering.. That was a fun time...

Although DECnet was never going to scale beyond a few hundred or a thousand nodes.

I recall a big European research network that had dozens of international links on the then-speedy X.25 packet switched network. I recall a friend mentioned in passing he had once accidently reset the DECnet config of his Swiss microVAX to the wrong address, thereby somehow crashing the whole network. Until he put it back.

There were days of complaints about why the network had crashed but no-one ever determined who or how.

Pathworks??

Nooooooo!

Still in daily usage on Itanium where i work.

Can't wait to move it to VMware as getting hardware to work with it can be tricky. Hardware requirements and drivers have always been very specific.

Dave Cutler was involved in its conception before he moved on to NT4, Shame he never bothered to copy the Clustering in to Windows as MS version has always been on the wrong side of pants in comparison.

Why?

I mean its cool in many ways, but much like the Rad BASIC article.... Why?

"Alpha kit is long in the tooth," so what can we say about x86? That it bites?