[HN Gopher] How Big Is VMS? - VMS Software, Inc
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       How Big Is VMS? - VMS Software, Inc
        
       Author : rbanffy
       Score  : 18 points
       Date   : 2025-04-03 18:46 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (vmssoftware.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (vmssoftware.com)
        
       | jamesy0ung wrote:
       | Is there any reason to use VMS today other than for existing
       | applications that cannot be migrated? I've heard its reliability
       | is legendary, but I've never tried it myself. The 1 year licensed
       | VM seems excessively annoying. Is it just old and esoteric, or
       | does it still have practical use? At least with Linux, multiple
       | vendors release and support distros and it is mainstream, whereas
       | with VMS, you'd be stuck with VSI.
        
         | davesmylie wrote:
         | I was actually surprised to see that there's been a release in
         | the last 12 months - I had thought it was dead.
         | 
         | I used it extensively in the late 90's early 00's and really
         | liked it. As a newb sysadmin at the time, the built-in
         | versioning on the fs saved me from more than one self-inflicted
         | fsck up.
         | 
         | I can't imagine there would be any green-field deployments in
         | the last 10 years or so - I'm guessing it's just supporting
         | legacy environments.
        
           | rbanffy wrote:
           | MCP and MVS (now called z/OS) are all still supported. Not
           | sure whether MCP still receives updates though.
        
         | jonstewart wrote:
         | I had a job at a place in college, back 1997-2000, that was run
         | by a big DEC Alpha server running VMS. VMS was dying then.
         | 
         | I was just a lowly kid programmer working on a side project, so
         | I can't tell you whether it's still uniquely good at something
         | to justify its usage today. It worked. But it was weird and
         | arcane (not that Unix isn't, but Unix won) and using it today
         | for a new project would come with a lot of friction.
        
           | cbm-vic-20 wrote:
           | VAX/VMSCluster was like the Kubernetes of the 1980s. Lots of
           | features that appeared in k8s decades later were baked into
           | VMS.
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMScluster
        
         | icedchai wrote:
         | It's fun for hobbyists! The first multi-user system I used
         | happened to be a VAX/VMS system, so it brings me back to my
         | youth. I have a VAX running in simh, complete with compilers.
         | The release, VMS 7.3, is almost 25 years old.
        
         | smackeyacky wrote:
         | I used it a bit at University - most notably it had an Occam
         | system on it that wasn't available on the Sun workstations.
         | 
         | I'm curious about running a VMS system although the admin side
         | looks a bit daunting. The thing I'd really like to do is run
         | X-Windows on an emulator on my home lab, just to see it run.
        
       | ConanRus wrote:
       | they sits on that legacy IP as if anybody cared, i was in the
       | hobbyist program and they screwed it. I was able to download and
       | setup all their products, and now i cant do even that, the only
       | option is to re-download and re-setup an VM image every 6 month
       | or so.
       | 
       | really "user friendly". and then they're wining that nobody
       | contributes to the opensource for VMS.
        
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       (page generated 2025-04-03 23:00 UTC)