This feed contains the 10 most recent pages in the "VMS" category.
The news today, provided by The Register, is that HP has decided to put an end to VMS.
Somehow, the only thing happening in me is a sigh and a silent final goodbye. I think I've seen this coming for years, even though not very consciously... it's been ages since I wrote a single line of DCL, it's a couple of years since I last logged in on a VMS machine... I think I personally let VMS die a long time ago, a slow death.
VMS is worth remembering, though. In many ways, it's a fantastic operating system. Not for the command line, but for the internal functionality. In my mind, nothing beats the system services provided, nothing beats the $QIO and events functionality, it was possible to write a completely event driven program with just a few lines of code.
My life with VMS started 1989/1990, when I landed a part time
job as a system manager. Shortly before, I had fallen in love with
GNU emacs, and was amazed that there was a pretty damn good port of
version 18.55 for VMS. That was a somewhat aged version, though,
and I knew that I wanted to be able to use version 18.59 that was
the current version at the time. So I started working on porting it
and sharing the results, and enhancing things that I wanted to work
better than before.
In a few years, I had learned OpenVMS (Digital renamed the
operating system to indicate that it got POSIX certified), grew
into a good system admin as well as programmer, dived into the free
software/opensource community and gained some fame for working on
and maintaining the port of emacs for VMS.
A few years later, I started enhancing the port of SSLeay for VMS,
later to become the port of OpenSSL. This lead to a job, further
enhancements of OpenSSL and a membership in the OpenSSL development
team, and somewhere along the way, I became fairly good at writing
code that would build and run smootly on multiple operating system
families (OpenVMS and Unix, first of all).
In the end, I can't thank VMS enough. It provided me with an entrance to so many things that shaped me for some 20+ years, and has been fun to play with and work with for many of those years.
Today, it's like finally parting from a friend that I've seen slowly fade away over a few years.
Goodbye, friend...
To see all of them, check the archive-VMS.