Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bdavis__ 1285 days ago
How about proprietary "non unix's"?

Anyone running VMS? RSTS/E ? Or on rare hardware, OS-32 on a PE 8/32, or MPX on any SEL 32 family? MPE on Harris ?

3 comments

Part of our business-critical financial analytics software was running on VAX/VMS, then AlphaVMS decades ago. Written in DEC Pascal (let's just say - not really compatible with any other Pascal dialects I am aware of). We managed to port the whole system to Linux (before Linux became fashionable) by a godawful contraption made of Scheme, Perl, shell and elisp - it "translated" the Pascal code into a dialect understood by p2c, which in turn translated it to C. That was mucho fun!
I have an AlphaServer in my collection, running OpenVMS. It's been a while since I've booted it up. It's very loud.
ssh'd to a live alpha server at work last year. there were some files on there I wanted to look at.

the machine has to be at least 20 years old at this point. but it feels fast. bash. find. xargs grep. command line stuff very responsive.

it felt fast back then. i do remember that.

Alphas were incredible when they first came out. The one I have is a DS10, probably also 20 years old-ish. It still feels responsive.
It was a DS-20
I know the problem. My AS/400e would also get much more powered on time if it wasn't so damn loud.
I'VE GOT A SUN BLADE WORKSTATION. YEAH IT'S RUNNING RIGHT NOW, HOW COULD YOU TELL?
"NO MOM, I CANNOT TURN THAT OFF. IT'S MY SERVER."
Unironically this question could deserve its own thread.