Rip vms :(

[SiempreTuna]

.. or rather OpenVMS, the direct descendent of VAX/VMS, the imminent death of which has been announced.

.. who knew it was still around?

VMS was the first O/S I used, on a VAX. Seemed so very modern, particularly compared with the heinous things IBM mainframes were running at the time .. actually, still are running.

I went on to do work on DECwindows and OS/2, those other famously world beating O/Ses. Thinking about it, it's a wonder I'm still working in IT ..

 

[Davdi]

Nothing wrong with Z/OS, except Honeywell did mainframe OS much better in the 1970's.
DOS/VSE on the other hand was the very spawn of the devil.

 

[Mayhem]

I loved OS/2. I actually worked as a contractor at IBM Austin in OS/2 Support as a L2 Network Support analyst.

IBM really screwed the pooch when it came to OS/2.

I still have a copy of OS/2 Warp for Windows

And a 3.5" floppy disc from "Microsoft OS/2 v1.0"

 

[SiempreTuna]

I remember OS/2 as actually being pretty good - way better than windoze. Actually paid a fortune to get a very early 386 so I'd be ready to run it when it took over the world.

Been a long wait ..

 

[saptech]

I remember working for a bank, part time, using VAX/VMS...it was a good learning experience but different coming from an IBM Mainframe shop. I think Compaq was getting ready to buy out DEC. This was during the '90s.

 

[nickdalzell]

I was actually using OS/2 Warp 4 on a new laptop and got the drivers working, a decent version of SeaMonkey, Adobe Flash Player, and BAM! there went the hard drive. Tried reinstalling but couldn't get it to work just right anymore. Too much time had passed and most of the sites used to get Flash and the drivers are now just displaying 404 File Not Found or 403 Forbidden

 

[SiempreTuna]

I remember working for a bank, part time, using VAX/VMS...it was a good learning experience but different coming from an IBM Mainframe shop

Quite a bit more intuitive than mainframe, I would have thought - on one mainframe o/s, to list files in a folder was something like ISPF 3.4 - WTF?!

I was actually using OS/2 Warp 4 on a new laptop and got the drivers working, a decent version of SeaMonkey, Adobe Flash Player, and BAM! there went the hard drive. Tried reinstalling but couldn't get it to work just right anymore. Too much time had passed and most of the sites used to get Flash and the drivers are now just displaying 404 File Not Found or 403 Forbidden

Bummer!

Guess if those sites were hosted on OS/2, they could have gone the same way

 

[Tom2112]

You know what's funny: we're still using OpenVMS where I work. Until only a couple of years ago, ALL of our primary applications were on VMS! We had one alpha-based VMS server dishing out services to over 100 schools and hundreds of users. In fact, we had over 40,000 email accounts on it.

From a user-to-computing-power ratio VMS was/is amazing. One thing that I still wish I could port over to Windows is the VMS editor. It has its quirks, but once you learn it, it gets in your blood. It can be very powerful (and not nearly as annoyingly cryptic as vi).