[Info-vax] Basic Questions

[John Wallace]

On Sep 3, 9:03 am, wins... at SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU (Alan Winston - SSRL
Central Computing) wrote:
> In article <0a10fc19-f772-40cc-a40e-8c732b5ad... at i18g2000pro.googlegroups.com>, Julian R A Manning <julian.r.a.mann... at gmail.com> writes:
>
> >Hello
>
> >I have the following basic questions about VMS:
>
> These are pretty basic. DO you have a homework assignment?
>
>
>
> >Type of OS? For example is it single/multi-user, multitasking etc?
>
> Multi-user/Multi-tasking server OS with reasonable real-time capabilities.
>
> >General Features? For example firewall, GUI?
>
> Active/Active clustering, host-based volume shadowing.
>
> XWindows support and an Xwindows gui, native DCL command line interface,
> optional Unix-like shell.
>
>
>
> >Minimum Hardware Requirements?
>
> Depends on software version.  Vax, Alpha, Itanium or convincing emulation or
> virtualized version of those things.
>
> >File Systems supported?
>
> ODS-1, ODS-2, ODS-5, FAT (in limited applications), whatever the ISO standard
> is for CDs.
>
>
>
> >Applications?
>
> Web server, database server, control systems.  Used in manufacturing, medical
> records, cellphone billing and text messaging, etc, etc.
>
> You might want to go towww.hp.com/go/openvmsand poke around.
>
> -- Alan

Same author asked functionally identical questions re freebsd in
another ng on 31 August, according to Google Groups.

Still, all VMS-related interest gratefully received, and the answers
so far are a good start.

The magic ISO number for CDs is ISO9660 if i remember rightly.

Might be worth mentioning that VMS V1 was a 32bit OS which came out in
1978 (?) and the current 64/32bit version of VMS is V8.x?

And describing VMS as having "reasonable" realtime capabilities
probably is being a little unfair; e.g. in a different era, in the
hands of the right people, imo VMS could well have been the underlying
platform for real time apps such as "high frequency trading" which
we've seen written about round here recently (though whether that's a
"typical" real time application is arguable).