[Info-vax] New CEO of VMS Software

[chrisq]

On 1/7/24 17:22, Dan Cross wrote:
 > In article <uneg09$1497f$1 at dont-email.me>, chrisq 
<devzero at nospam.com> wrote:
 >> On 1/7/24 14:04, Dan Cross wrote:
 >>> In article <une6iq$12vd9$1 at dont-email.me>, chrisq 
<devzero at nospam.com> wrote:
 >>>> On 1/6/24 23:42, Dan Cross wrote:
 >>>>> [snip]
 >>>>> Or FreeBSD.  Or OpenBSD.
 >>>>
 >>>> Been running FreeBSD for years now, Works out of the box on various
 >>>> architectures and a base install takes  around 20 minutes. Ditched
 >>>> Linux as it became more bloated and especially, the systemd 
trainwreck,
 >>>> which I saw as a power grab by RedGat. Gross amount of complexity 
added
 >>>> for no good reason. Having said that, have Suse and xubuntu installed
 >>>> on a couple of machines, for software compatability testing reasons.
 >>>> Always liked Suse Linux in the past, but again systemd, the disease
 >>>> that has infected so many Linux distros.
 >>>>
 >>>> As for licensing, and having been around many vendor's unix offerings
 >>>> for decades, the only onerous licensing was associated with third
 >>>> party apps, where a license manager needed to be installed to run
 >>>> the app. Embedded C cross compilers, real time os, and tools,for
 >>>> example.
 >>>
 >>> AIX licensing was a pain.
 >>
 >> A single example :-).
 >
 > Well, yes, but also DG, HP, etc.  SGI and Sun seemed to do it
 > right, but then I was on the technical side and didn't have to
 > worry too much about the business side of folks who were keeping
 > track of licenses, etc.
 >
 > I remember hating it.  Coming from a more "traditional" Unix
 > background, it was ... weird.  Printing, storage management,
 > man pages, the security infrastructure, all felt gratuitously
 > different for no real reason.  You were almost forced to use
 > their menu-driven management tools, but as the USENIX button at
 > the time said, "SMIT happens."  It all felt very big-M
 > "Mainframe" inspired.  The compilers were very good, and the
 > machines were fast, but the developer tools weren't bundled and
 > I remembered fighting a lot of third-party software to get it to
 > compile and run properly.
 >
 > That was all weird because, on the 6150 ("RT") machines they had
 > offered a very nice version of 4.3BSD Tahoe plus NFS to the
 > academic community; clearly, people at IBM knew how to "do" Unix
 > right.
 >
 > Weirdest for me was the lack of a real console.  There was a
 > 3-digit 7-segment LED display that would cycle through various
 > numbers as the system booted up; things that would have been
 > emitted to a serial port on a VAX (or even a Sun) were instead
 > represented by random collections of digits, and there was a
 > book you had to look at to see what was going on if something
 > hung.  Something like "371" was "fsck failed on /usr."  (I don't
 > recall if that was the exact code).  Then were was a the damned
 > key, where the system wouldn't boot if it was in the "locked"
 > position.  Which sucked if the machine crashed for some random
 > reason.  I walked into a lab one day and the entire network was
 > down because all the machines had crashed over some network
 > hiccup and the damned sysadmin had turned everything to "Locked"
 > for some obscure reason ("it's more secure.")  I guess he was
 > right: it's certainly more "secure" if no one can use the
 > computers.  :-/
 >

The RS6000k here (7043/150) has a bios console, updated from
ibmfiles.com.  Functionality as one would expect. including
extensive diags. Yes, there is a seven segment display showing
post and boot progress, but running headless, that could be a
real advantage. Can't be sure about C compiler, but think there
is one. Package management seems good, so just a few minutes task
to install Gnu tools. Also, the file system layout is more or
less as expected. Perhaps the early machines were as you describe,
but not the one here. You don't have to use the automated tools,
smit etc either, but they do have their uses. Pretty cool, fully
sorted system, in fact. Slightly different in some ways, but easy
to get to grips with and find way around.

 >
 > Ha, yeah, my SPARC hardware down in the basement hasn't been
 > turned on in years: it's too expensive to run.
 >

Yes, archive server only now, powered up as needed, but at 600+
watts with the drive arrays, before even pressing a key, totally
unworkable :-). Still have SS20 and more to play with though.

 >
 > The trend had already started before that, I'm afraid.  A lot of
 > former Sun people I know acknowledged that they tried to stick
 > with SPARC as a differentiator way longer than they should have,
 > and that they should have embraced x86 much earlier than they
 > did.  They had a head-start with the Roadrunner, but they gave
 > up.  Had they stayed with it, perhaps life would have been
 > different.
 >

Sparc is still quite competitive technically, if you look at
the specs. It's just that Oracle have given up on it. Solaris
always was a very secure and robust OS and there are real
advantages from running a non X86 architecture, from a
security pov.

I remember seeing one of the early Sun X86 boxes, a 386i,
1999 ish. An awful machine, slow, expensive and underwhelming,
even compared to Sun 3.

Everyone hated it, but what they did produce were the X86 PC
on a card products, to plug in to sbus and pci Sparc machines.
Would run almost as a standalone pc, with all the sockets on
the card cage bracket, including vga video, keyboard, mouse,
soundcard etc, but were also  highly integrated into the file
system and desktop at the Sunos / Solaris side. Quite
reasonable  performance for the time and remember running
Lotus 123 and a raft of pc apps via one of the cards.

Perhaps a bit hard on DEC, as one of the things I most liked
about DEC was the integrity and attention to detail of the h/w
and s/w. Ran an Alpha 500/400  machine for many years. Tru64 unix,
a very solid OS. but bit by bit, became an orphan with little
open source support and no real future pathway. In many ways,
it's open source software that has made many platforms what they
are today, and their success, or not. If i'm still annoyed at
DEC, it's because they had some of the best product and minds in
the business from a technical pov, but squandered the lot on a
greedy and inflexible business model. Hubris is it's own reward
etc.

The really oddball unix ime, was HP-UX, where nothing is where
one would expect to find it, and a whole shedload of oddly named
commsnds, like learning a new language.

Have a good new year anyway. Still some progress, with arm and
Risc 5 likely to further upset the established order :-)...

Chris