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Supercomputers!

Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
I worked in the VMS development group at Digital for three years. While VMS was clearly better than Unix (:D), it was also clear that an OS that uses less system resources has certain advantages. It was also clear that VMS was stuck on VAXen, while Unix was free to wander the hills.

~~ Paul
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VMS ran on the VAX that was created for it for so many years that the users still call any computer running VMS a VAX. VMS officially moved to the ALPHA archetecture about a decade ago and was/is also supported on Intel.
 
Dan O. said:
VMS ran on the VAX that was created for it for so many years that the users still call any computer running VMS a VAX. VMS officially moved to the ALPHA archetecture about a decade ago and was/is also supported on Intel.
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Yes, and given that so little was written in assembler, you could have ported it to X86 architecture (calling that an architecture is like making the same claim about the Winchester House) without much difficulty.
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
I worked in the VMS development group at Digital for three years. While VMS was clearly better than Unix (:D), it was also clear that an OS that uses less system resources has certain advantages. It was also clear that VMS was stuck on VAXen, while Unix was free to wander the hills.

~~ Paul
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Paul, well aware of your VMS development group involvement. Might I just mention PHONE :D


Dan O. said:
I'll soon be shutting down my VMS cluster that has given many years of faithful service. Does anyone recall where the off switch is?
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What is this "off switch" of which you speak ? ;)


Dan O. said:
VMS ran on the VAX that was created for it for so many years that the users still call any computer running VMS a VAX. VMS officially moved to the ALPHA architecture about a decade ago and was/is also supported on Intel.
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A decade ago ??? Make that more than 2 decades. 1992 was when I first got my hands on an Alpha. And the Intel architecture you allude to above is, unfortunately, the IA64 (aka Itanium) which I predict to finally die in the near future (for some definition of "near").


BenBurch said:
Yes, and given that so little was written in assembler, you could have ported it to X86 architecture (calling that an architecture is like making the same claim about the Winchester House) without much difficulty.
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The VMS Engineering Group would beg to differ.
 
Blue Bubble said:
A decade ago ??? Make that more than 2 decades. 1992 was when I first got my hands on an Alpha.
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We had to wait for the VAXes to age out before upgrading the cluster. But I did get to run 10,000 SETI blocks burning it in before switching production to the new hardware. That would have been '99 or 2000.

BTW, which fool decided that the system clock should run local time and require manual changes for DST?
 
Dan O. said:
We had to wait for the VAXes to age out before upgrading the cluster. But I did get to run 10,000 SETI blocks burning it in before switching production to the new hardware. That would have been '99 or 2000.

BTW, which fool decided that the system clock should run local time and require manual changes for DST?
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Back in the days when Burns Fisher got SETI to run on VMS, I was way up the league table.

BTW: VMS got auto DST changing many, many years ago. Admittedly the initial design was somewhat, ahem, shortsighted. However, there are sites where any non-monotonic changes in system time are not allowed. Think about it ...
 
Dan O. said:
VMS ran on the VAX that was created for it for so many years that the users still call any computer running VMS a VAX. VMS officially moved to the ALPHA archetecture about a decade ago and was/is also supported on Intel.
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You are correct. I overstated the case when I said VMS was stuck on VAXen. I believe Unix is easier to port to other systems and had been ported to many before VMS was ported to Alphas. But that was after my time, so I still think about VAXen.

~~ Paul
 
Well, I can port native Forth to anything whatsoever in a weekend, but that doesn't cause me to recommend it as an operating system for most things even so.

I suppose I shouldn't complain, I get paid quite well to work around issues in *nix systems that wouldn't have even been questions for a VMS deployment.
 
BenBurch said:
Well, I can port native Forth to anything whatsoever in a weekend, but that doesn't cause me to recommend it as an operating system for most things even so.
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I, for one, am certainly not recommending Unix over VMS. I don't much like Unix. Too many intoxicated graduate students involved.

I suppose I shouldn't complain, I get paid quite well to work around issues in *nix systems that wouldn't have even been questions for a VMS deployment.
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Excellent!

~~ Paul
 
Soapy Sam said:
This is a rather sad thread. When did nerds start turning into old farts ?:(
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When they realized that the new stuff isn't necessarily better than the old stuff? Of course, I speak from the perspective of an old fart.

Evidence: Almost every new version of software products that I have installed in the past couple of years is clearly worse than the previous version. The whole GUI thing has software engineers acting like clowns. And I don't mean that the icons aren't as pretty (although that is true of iOS 7), I mean the interface is broken in significant ways.

End of oldFart.rant;

Wait, did I express my opinion of camelcase?

~~ Paul
 
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No point in getting all humppity. Just restore the missing space.
 
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Like this: Camel CaseWP

And as a bonus, Here is an extra space for you to express your opinion in:

" "​
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
I worked in the VMS development group at Digital for three years. While VMS was clearly better than Unix (:D), it was also clear that an OS that uses less system resources has certain advantages. It was also clear that VMS was stuck on VAXen, while Unix was free to wander the hills.

~~ Paul
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I can still remember the first commercial Unix system we ran SAP on after using MVS (as it was then). It was cheap, but it was also pathetic. "Kernel Panic"? bring down the whole system. Security? Yeah, we're getting around to that. Tied to one architecture? No, OK, that still makes it worth it.

One of the probelms with supercomputers is that artchitectures are not software friendly. Intel's IA64 being the most extreme example.
 
Dan O. said:
Like this: Camel CaseWP
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That's odd. First they specify the preferred spelling as "camelCase" with a secondary spelling of "camel case," but then they use the secondary spelling throughout the article. Is this a mistake, or is someone expressing his/her opinion of how it should be spelled? In any event, it should be "camelCase," in parallel with uppercase and lowercase.

We can only hope for its demise:

http://pando.com/2013/01/03/was-2012-the-year-camelcase-died/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/magazine/29FOB-onlanguage-t.html?_r=1&

~~ Paul
 
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