David M Williams
Thursday, 20 August 2009 19:24
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
Like anyone who has been in IT for a reasonable length of time I've worked with technologies that have lapsed, been superseded, died off or just simply gone out of vogue. Yet there are some my heart yearns to see again.
Don't get me wrong; I love what I do and the joy of modern tech. I'm a Linux man, a server and database guy, but there are some products and platforms I've worked with that were just that little bit special during their time in the spotlight.
Not every memory is a fond one; I never warmed to Novell Netware and I never found Visual C++ to be particularly visual. I didn't take to Lisp and I wish death upon Microsoft Access.
However, let me tell you today and the next two days about three bits of tech I’d love to see again starting with the VAX/VMS operating system.
Don’t get me wrong: VMS still exists in the form of OpenVMS but it’s just not quite the same. If you think Linux has a hard time getting business buy-in consider how much less the name recognition of VMS is in this modern day.
Nevertheless, the VAX/VMS was once on top of its field. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) had much to be proud of. Its PDP and VAX minicomputer lines were highly popular among scientific and engineering communities across the ‘70’s and ‘80’s.
The DEC Rainbow 100 was an early dual-processor system that ran CP/M and MS-DOS and sported a delightful keyboard. The Rainbow form factor was re-used in later text terminals.
It was even a DEC PDP system that was chosen for the development of UNIX, the forerunner of Linux.
In 1998 DEC was acquired by Compaq before Compaq was in turn swallowed by Hewlett-Packard four years later.
Before this series of takeovers DEC's biggest invention was the VAX series of computers, with a complex machine code instruction set and facilities for virtual memory addressing.
The operating system used was VMS, a sturdy environment with file versioning and a range of distinct privileges, not to mention a rich command-line instruction language.
