[Info-vax] Possible VMS jobs - City of New York Fire Dept

[Michael Moroney]

Kerry Main <kemain.nospam at gmail.com> writes:

>> -----Original Message-----

>Not sure of any hidden gotchas, but looks interesting. Posted Oct 25, 2019.


>Extract:
>The Fire Department, City of New York (FDNY), seeks a full-time CAD Analyst
>in the Bureau of Technology Development and Systems. Reporting directly to
>the Director of CAD & ECTP Development, the CAD Analyst shall perform
>analysis of systems and processes to further the automation of fire and
>medical dispatch functions; participate in the design of these tasks in
>support of fire and medical dispatch requirements; produce the automation
>tools resulting from the analysis and design and implement those tools. The
>selected candidate shall lead the development, implementation, and
>configuration of monitoring tools and capability for all Computer Aided
>Dispatch systems and devices; coordinate with department and
>extra-department monitoring bodies to ensure timely and accurate reporting
>of all CAD-related events to network/system monitors and Doitt's
>Monitor-of-monitors. Additionally, the candidate shall manage the CAD system
>operating systems (OpenVMS), applying all relevant OS releases and patches.

I worked there for a contractor about 7 years ago.  Oh the stories I could 
tell.

Caveat: I don't know what has changed over the last 7 years...

This was the main dispatch system for the Fire Dept. of New York City. My job
was initially to port the dispatch system from VAX to Itanium (skipping Alpha
entirely), later was to improve/rewrite problematic code and implement
policy changes into the code.

Port VMS code from VAX to Itanium, just recompile and relink, right? HAHAHA,
err, excuse me, but nope. This is homebrew code starting from the mid 1970s.
Totally NYC-specific, not even close to being generic dispatch SW.
It started on a PDP-11, Macro-11, and was later ported to VAX. Much of the
PDP-11 assembler was converted by software into VAX assembler.  Over time
many many people tinkered with it and by the time I saw it, it was a couple
hundred thousand lines of Macro-32 with maybe 5-10% ported to C.  If you know
(or were) someone who helped port VMS to Alpha years ago, the Macro-32 compiler
is much pickier than the VAX assembler was, so we relived much of that.
Plus so many "wheels" were re-invented, there was lots of code that did things
that are in the VMS RTL or system services. Because they had to do things the 
hard way on the PDPs.

Much of what got run through the MACRO-32 assembler/compiler was much of the 
semi-permanent DATA - things like the streets or equipment databases which got 
updated once a week to once every couple months. The "real" databases got
converted to a bunch of macro calls, a header (calling/defining the macros) and
a trailer (a .END line) got tacked on, assembled, then $ LINK/SYSTEM=0/NOHEADER
producing a binary file.

OK, I'll stop now, I could babble for some time on this if allowed to...