Public Access OpenVMS System

VMS was the first multiuser system I used in 1991. I was amazed that a single computer could have 300 users logged in all doing their own thing.<p>I learned to program in C and tried using Borland Turbo C on a DOS. Go outside of the array index and you could easily crash the entire machine which meant reboot and try it again. I thought the concept of memory protection was incredible! Why didn&#x27;t every computer have that?<p>It was the first time I saw email, sending messages, and the phone utility for chatting with other users while waiting for your programs to run in the background.<p>I moved on to an IBM RT running AIX and got hooked on Unix. That&#x27;s the system I wanted and have been running Linux since 1994. But VMS still holds a special place.

VMS had asynchronous programming to its core. Most system calls could be performed synchronously or async. You just had to give the async call a flag that would indicate when the response was ready. So you could read a file or connect to the network, continue execution and when you actually needed the answer, just sys$wait(flag). Or have callback functions. It worked extremely well as some else mentioned, 64Mb of RAM was enough to handle 200 interactive users with RDB (database IMO far superior to Oracle that was acquired by them and promptly buried)

My first serious (multiuser) system experience was VMS. The concurrency, the power of DCL, the record based nature of files, the mail box concept for process communication, the accounting system, the granular privs, the cluster concept. I came to UNIX second and still miss some of these things.

You can also follow this guide to run your own VMS 1.0 on a VAX 11&#x2F;780 emulator.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gunkies.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Installing_VMS_V1.0_on_SIMH" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gunkies.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Installing_VMS_V1.0_on_SIMH</a>

Reminds me of the old Deathrow cluster. Sadly it shut down years ago after a hardware failure.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8118287">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8118287</a>

I&#x27;m familiar with a site that once had around 30 Vaxen for scientific computing in the late 1980s. This included Vax 11&#x2F;780s, 11&#x2F;750s, uVax I&#x27;s, uVax II&#x27;s and eventually a Vax 8800 used to feed a Cray Y-MP. All long gone. Linux has moved in and taken over.

Does anyone remember another public VMS system called &quot;Carl&quot; or Carl.best.net or something like that? I had fun playing with VMS on it, but that was years ago.

It looks like even though VMS Software Inc have taken over development of OpenVMS, HP still hosts the v8.4 documentation set, for instance here&#x27;s the system services reference manual:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;h41379.www4.hpe.com&#x2F;doc&#x2F;84final&#x2F;4527&#x2F;4527pro.html#first_page" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;h41379.www4.hpe.com&#x2F;doc&#x2F;84final&#x2F;4527&#x2F;4527pro.html#fir...</a>

what interesting software is there to run on a VMS machine?

wooohooo... it had been a long long time since I last entered VMS command in a terminal !<p>Thank you sooo much for making this happen! very happy here

The is the beyond of cool. Is the hardware real?

Alas. My account has expired.

that box seems to already have the hug of death

sys$system brings tears to my eyes...