<p>ⓒ Richard Levitte</p>
http://journal.richard.levitte.org/tags/archive-VMS/Richard Levitte's journalikiwiki2013-06-11T08:26:49ZR.I.P. VMShttp://journal.richard.levitte.org/entries/RIP-VMS/2013-06-11T08:26:49Z2013-06-11T08:26:49Z
<p>The news today, provided by The Register, is that <a href=
"http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/10/openvms_death_notice/">HP
has decided to put an end to VMS</a>.</p>
<p>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 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIGITAL%5FCommand%5FLanguage">DCL</a>,
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br />
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.<br />
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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Today, it's like finally parting from a friend that I've seen
slowly fade away over a few years.</p>
<p>Goodbye, friend...</p>