[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?