[Info-vax] Computing Experience, What brought you to VMS?

[Colin Butcher]

- Used PDP11s and DEC10 at University (Leeds, UK) as part of Mechanical 
Engineering course in mid-70s.
- Borrowed company IBM mainframe in first post-Uni job to iteratively solve 
complex geometric equations for design of former plate on folder for high 
speed web offset printing presses. Discovered that messing about with 
computer stuff could actually be useful for real world work.
- Moved to Bristol, UK and ended up at CEGB doing heat transfer and fluid 
dynamics work on power stations and reactors. Used PDP11/34 and RSX to 
correlate data with mathematical models. Ended up fixing PDP11 and RSX so 
that mean time between failure of system was greater than time needed to 
plough through all the data. It was a very strange and at first horribly 
unreliable PDP11/34 with all sorts of non-standard bits (DataRAM solid state 
storage, dual graphics terminals with light pens, etc.).
- Switched to power station control systems group and ended up doing all 
sorts of PDP11 / RSX stuff - anyone remember the CEGB developed real-time 
environment Cutlass? Anyone remember the RL02 head magnetisation problem? - 
we had about 40 drives + innumerable packs screwed up by that.
- Joined Prosig and did all sorts of high speed A to D and signal processing 
stuff, including FPS array processors strapped onto big (for then) VAXen and 
TMS320 boards shoved into uVAX IIs.
- Joined Scisys and ended up designing the systems side of ground control 
centres for flying satellites. First one pre-dated VAXstations, so we built 
our own workstations using dual-head Sigmex graphics boxes with uVAX IIs, 
all hooked up with dual ethernet (fibre at 10Mbps) to a long row of MIRA 
uVAX IIs. Grappled with the RV20 and many other strange and interesting 
devices. Became one of the first serious users of DECnet Phase V and DECnis 
routers, which was an "interesting" experience. Ended up being one of DEC's 
bigger customers for MIRA uVAX II and VAX 4000 based systems. Sunbsequently 
moved everything over to VMS on Alpha with XP900s / DS10s and HSZ storage 
arrays etc. All good fun.
- Set up XDelta back in 1996 and have ended up doing all sorts of 
interesting, difficult and sometimes scary stuff since. Craziest system was 
the network of VAX 8600s surrounded by PDP11/44s that had home-brew shared 
memory boards (VAX <-> PDP) and booted their RSX11S images through the 
shared memory window off a disc on the VAX by a program entering the octal 
boot loader over a serial line from a DZ11 to the PDP11 console! Remember - 
this was designed pre-ethernet, so it was actually seriously ingenious, but 
hellish complex to figure out and maintain. There were quite a few other 
ingenious as hell things lurking in there too.
- Got involved with GS1280s and Galaxy a lot. Dammed nice machines with 
serious levels of performance.
- Got involved with VMS on IA64 early on and have done quite a few 
mission-critical systems migrations.
- Now also involved with helping people move away from VMS, which is sad, 
but that's where we've ended up.
- Have a fairly decent lab of my own with VAX (4000-100), Alpha (DS10, ES40 
as a Galaxy cluster) and IA64 (rx2660), FC storage, lots of network kit, 
plus Windows / Linux / VMware stuff as well.

It's all good fun, mostly! It's been nice to meet and work with a lot of 
really good people along the way. Hopefully that'll continue for a good few 
years yet.

-- 
Cheers, Colin.
---------------------
Legacy = Stuff that works properly!