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by justinclift 862 days ago
> They so far are the only ones that can do it reliably, for decades.

AFAIK VAX's are still around, though good luck trying to buy a brand new one. ;)
1 comments
zie 861 days ago
VMS still exists and is ported to x86! :)

I should point out, I was talking about mainframes in general, to include Vaxen, Fujitsu, Unisys, etc. IBM isn't the only mainframe game in town.

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justinclift 860 days ago
The term "mainframe" has never included Vax's. Not sure why you're trying add it now. ;)
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zie 860 days ago
The VAX9000 was the end of their mainframe line of VAX machines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX_9000
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sillywalk 860 days ago
That was a disaster for DEC. It cost $Billions to develop and was barely faster than an NVAX that fit into a desktop case.
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zie 857 days ago
Indeed, they definitely screwed that one up.
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justinclift 860 days ago
Oh wow, hadn't heard of that. I'd only heard of them doing minicomputers.

That being said, from that their mainframe effort didn't last long.

So they're not a mainframe vendor any more. Their minicomputers were reliable across decades, rather than their mainframes. ;)

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zie 860 days ago
Well that was their last mainframe model. Yes, VMS still exists, but only on x86 now. VAX has been dead and buried for a long time now. They had a whole different compute architecture or two between then and now.

VAX -> Alpha -> Itanium -> x86.

I worked on VMS at the tail end of the VAX days and then through the Alpha days. Overall I thought VMS was pretty neat. Built in file versioning, the cluster stuff was awesome, arguably better than what k8s and the like can even provide now. They had uptimes in decades, that's not something k8s or any of the other new clustering stuff can even dream of achieving right now.

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justinclift 859 days ago
Yeah, I got an account with VMS Software a few months ago.

However, their website and staff members are so brain damaged that I just couldn't bring myself to waste time with it.

Specifically, their website can't even take apostrophe's (nor many other non alphanumeric symbols) in passwords.

Reported that to them, and their staff not only didn't give a shit, they were adamant that only "$#@!%*&" are all the non alphanumeric characters anyone might ever need (in passwords). :(

Thus my complete lack of interest in VMS from that point onwards. ;)

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