[Info-vax] What does VMS get used for, these days?

[Robert Carleton]

On Sunday, November 6, 2022 at 7:55:23 AM UTC-6, Scott Dorsey wrote: 
> First thing: VMS has heavyweight processes. There's a lot of stuff in the 
> process, so spawning off new processes takes a good while, and you don't do 
> it very often. Conceptually different than Unix and Unixalikes where the 
> processes are lightweight and the overhead of a fork is minimal so you fork 
> off a new process for nearly everything. 
> 
> Whereas the concept of "resources" in Linux is fairly simple, VMS has a lot 
> of different resources which are managed statically by the operating system. 
> Some of that resource management goes into making the processes more 
> heavyweight. This can be a powerful tool to keep multiple users from 
> interfering with one another on a system with limited resources. In a 
> scientific computing environment it can also be a pain in the neck because 
> people will run their job for three days and then hit a working set limit 
> and need to figure out what the limit really should be. 
> 
> But yes, some of the "big computer" batch features that you get with PBS and 
> OS/360 are present by default in VMS, and that's a nice thing. Using VMS on 
> a machine acting as a front-end to a high-speed computer was great. 
> 
> Mind you, the best batch management system in the world won't keep researchers 
> from paying the second shift operators under the table to move their jobs to 
> the front of the queue. 
> --scott 
> 
> -- 
> "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

Going a slightly different way, does files versioning help relieve the programmers from some of the work necessary to roll back a corrupted dataset when something goes wrong with their job? In the IBM world, they talk about the production control analysts managing the batch processing. I suppose file version control might be one of the tools that they use, maybe in organizations that have a lot of duty separation.