[stunthamsterio]

I'm genuinely looking forward to this. I used VMS back in the 90's and loved it as an OS. Clustering, versioned file systems, reasonably well formed error messages; it seemed very civilised.

It'd be nice to be able to run it in a VM and see how much I've forgotten. I've got an old workstation in my loft, but haven't really got the room to have it setup.

[icedchai]

VMS Clustering was very interesting. It was basically baked in to all layers of the OS, if I remember. You could access devices, file systems, users, batch queues, processes, etc. across the cluster. It felt very well designed.

[stunthamsterio]

That's one of my enduring memories of VMS, and something that came as a shock when I came to different OS - the lack of clustering. We had (As far as I remember) two vast servers called Alpha and Beta (With Gamma as a dev server). They were the size of a full-size rack for a single server. But from a developer perspective, my processes would run seamlessly across both of them and see a single FS, a single set of processors and RAM.

That and developing in Vista4GL. I'd kill to get hold of some manuals for that to remind myself what my first professional language was like.

[icedchai]

DEC had some innovative ideas with VMS, for sure... 40 years later, we still don't see anything quite like its clustering with Unix / Linux. I'm happy VMS Software is keeping it alive.

[bitwize]

You do see something like it with Plan 9.

[jakeogh]

Anyone familiar enough with plan9 resource sharing to compare the two?

[dekhn]

I used TruCluster (late 90s thru 2006) which was Tru64 UNIX (from DEC UNIX), I think it shared a lot of tech with VMS clustering. Many interesting ideas, such as being able to write to the filesystem with a guaranteed IO rate from any cluster node (100MB/s at a tiime when that was a lot) and many other things that are less interesting after you rewrite your software around not needing clustering.

[CaptainZapp]

HELP is your friend.

The VMS help system, while far less verbose than Unix man pages was, thanks to its hierarchical organisation really, well, helpful.

[LinuxBender]

Remember the bug / update that shortened (H)elp to Halt? :-) Some here for sure have to remember that one.

[dekhn]

the VMS HELP system was my introduction to "learn a system by using depth-first HELP". I also recall eventually coming across the page which explained dynamic linking (I couldn't even link hello world with my 2 block disk quota).

[CaptainZapp]

Same here.

My basic introduction was that my boss sat me in front of a VT220 terminal and told me about the HELP command.

Later I discovered the absolute awesomeness that was VMS (at that time, OpenVMS came later) documentation.

For me and to this day it's the benchmark how documentation should be written an organized.

[netrap]

They do have a free hobbyist VM on their website.

https://training.vmssoftware.com/hobbyist/

[ngcc_hk]

128 MB memory. The alpha emulator. Suddenly wake up.

Still remember for old time sake do some 360 assemble on an emulator. Suddenly I aware that is 16 MB not GB ... and I use a 24 MB one to support thousands of users in 1980s.

Those really were the days.

[stunthamsterio]

Oh nice tip, I didn't know that - Now I'll have to see if I can run a VMS VM inside my Windows VM... Turtles all the way down.

[snuxoll]

Would be humorous considering the NT platform was heavily inspired by VMS.

[pjmlp]

To the point that one can find similar APIs when reading VMS documentation.

[EricE]

Yup - having started with early Mac's and PC's in the late 80's and 90's, running into VMS in the 90's and experiencing a "real" operating system was an eye opener. The versioned file system was so cool and obvious I can't believe it never caught on with other platforms. Much nicer than snapshots since it was at the file level (different solutions for different problems!)

I bet VMS's versioning could have been the foundation for a fast, powerful and reliable de-dupe too. Hmm...