© 1996-2007
Phil Ottewell
The OpenVMS® Operating System
Introduction
OpenVMS, or VMS as it is still affectionately known to us VMS stalwarts, is a high reliability, high security operating system produced, if not very well marketed, by Digital Equipment Corporation. Their current slogan for OpenVMS is "24x365", which whilst not very catchy, is pretty accurate in what you can expect from a well configured VMS system.
It is quite common for VMS sites to go a couple of years between reboots, power supply allowing. Due to the gradations of privilege that can be granted to users or particular images, it is fairly straight forward to create a secure, robust environment to keep your business going "24x365". Or "5x24x52" if you're closed weekends.
If you need a VMS consultant, I would recommend HoffmanLabs. They provide full range of customized services, support and solutions for HP OpenVMS customers, along with customized on-site or off-site training, and full OpenVMS migration and porting assistance.
Have a look at my VMS Free Software Page for various bits of software ported to VMS. These include a Web Page Hit Counter (Muhammad Muquit's "odometer" style counter), GifMerge GIF Animator, TGD the GIF scripting program, and LiteClue help bubbles for Motif Applications.
A list of VMS related web links, including more Freeware, is at the bottom of this page. To see the latest freeware available from Compaq look at the OpenVMS - What's New page which usually has goodies like the latest Mozilla release for VMS, COM for VMS and so forth.
If you want to run your own VMS hobbyist system, the VMS 7.2 CD with various compilers including C++, C, Pascal, Basic, Fortran and Cobol, plus the licenses for lots of layered products, including clustering and TCPIP, can be obtained from Montagar Software for about $30. You can pick up a second hand VAXstation from Ebay or a brand new Alpha for $499 from Island Computers under their "Hobbyists" section. Ask for David Turner and tell him Phil sent you!
Nemonix Engineering also specialize in hardware, software and repair of VMS systems, maintenance, and hardware upgrades. They will diagnose any board for a flat fee of $50, plus you pay the freight. Business from hobbyist VMS systems is welcome. See Nemonix Engineering Web Site, ask for Roger Boyle and mention my web site.
If you want to read or write a DVD or CD from a VMS system, there is an excellent commercial program from Dr. Eberhard Heuser-Hofmann which supports VAX, Alpha and Integrity (Itanium) architectures, and a good number of DVD drives, plus ACARD SCSI-IDE-bridges. See http://www.dvdwrite.de/ for details. Eberhard has kindly made DVDWrite available free for VMS Hobbyists.
For some good advice on connecting your Hobbyist VMS system to the internet, contact me or see VAXman's Tips and Hints for Getting Your OpenVMS Hobbyist VAX or Alpha on the Internet which gives lots of good advice about connecting via dialup, ISDN, DSL and cable modem. I started off using a 3COM Courier modem using SLIP on a VAXstation VLC to connect to Demon in the UK (who give you a static IP address), but now have a LinkSys Firewall/Router and DSL service, again with static IP address, and my Hobbyist VMScluster lives behind the Linkys BEFSR-41 firewall with port forwarding to map services to the appropriate places.
If you want a good VT terminal emulator to run on a PC, I would recommend the free PuTTy Telnet/SSH Client. You can use it for plain telnet, or if your VMS machines are running the free OpenSSL based Secure Shell Server, you can use SSH and log in over the network without sending your password in plain text. It works on Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000 and XP on Intel x86, and Windows NT for Alpha.
VAX VMS Systems
The VAX 11/780 was the first computer to run the VMS operating system. It was introduced in 1977, and cost about $200,000 which was a lot of money in those days. Version 1.0 of VMS shipped to customers in February 1978.
The
![[Digital]](../gifs/digital_logo.gif){kind=logo}
internal code name for this machine was the
Star, and this is why the system library used to search for
unresolved symbols at LINK time is called SYS$LIBRARY:STARLET.OLB.
The venerable 11/780 was followed by the 11/750 in 1980, and the rather
underpowered, but lowest cost to that date, VAX 11/730 in 1982. Clustering was
unveiled in May 1983, and was supported up to 96 nodes, though in fact some
places succeeded in clustering over 200 machines. The first VAX workstation,
the appropriately named VAXstation 1 was introduced in October 1984, and I
remember using one of the first of these at
CERN shortly after that date.
There is a great VAX timeline at
Compaq
showing the rest of the VAX evolution.
If you want a hobbyist VAX system, I would suggest one of the 4000 series of workstations, such as the VLC, the model 60 or model 90. I find that Seagate SCSI disks work very well with these models. Search on Ebay to find one. These workstations are small, self contained and don't use much power. They have a Motif/X-Windows user interface, are very nicely built, and fun to run. You will probably want to find a compatible CD ROM drive from which to install VMS - they need to support 512 byte blocks as well as 2048 to boot VAX VMS from CD, whereas Alphas can use either. I use a MATSHITA CD-ROM CR-506, and SEAGATE ST32550N system disk.
Alpha VMS Systems
What is an Alpha ? The Alpha AXP chip is the 64 bit RISC
microprocessor designed for the next millenium (so DEC say) ! Because of its
cunning PALcode, Alphas can run
VMS,
Unix, or
Windows NT.
The SRM console firmware is used if the Alpha is to boot VMS or Digital Unix,
and the ARC console firmware is needed for WNT - assuming that you have the
licenses to run the software.
The RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Chip) CPU has 32 integer and 32 floating point registers, all 64 bits wide, and has on chip instruction and memory caches and multiple issue pipelining. To take advantage of these features the compiler has to particularly clever in scheduling the instruction stream, which leads to the criticism from some people that RISC really stands for "Relegate the Important Stuff to the Compiler"!
The Alpha chip is designed to give the most efficient memory access for naturally aligned data. Hence it is a good idea, when declaring structures or common blocks, to make quadwords (8 bytes) start at quadword offsets, longwords (4 bytes) start at longword offsets, and words (you guessed it - 2 bytes) start at word offsets. Occasionally this means adding padding bytes, though this can usually be avoided by declaring members in decreasing order of size. Byte addressing was added as a feature by the time the 21164A chip came out, and is supported on that and later Alpha chipsets.
Due to economic considerations, the Alpha chip will be discontinued after the next, EV7 version. Compaq are porting VMS to run on the 64 bit Intel® Itanium™.
For hobbyist use, I would recommend one of the Alpha workstations such as the 433au, 500au, 600au, or the DS10, DS20 or XP1000 if you are feeling a bit richer. See Island Computers for some great deals, and for spares and upgrade instructions. I should perhaps add that I am not in any way affiliated to Island Computers, other than as a satisfied customer.
BBC micro VMS Systems
![[Pacman ScreenShot]](../gifs/snapper.gif)
Unfortunately, these don't exist. A BBC micro emulator that runs on
VMS systems
does, however (almost as good) ! I ported
James Fidell's
XBeeb emulator to VAX and Alpha. This can be found on my
Free Software page.
VMS Tutorial
If you have never used a VMS system before a good place to start is my VMS Tutorial. This was updated recently but still requires a bit more work to bring it up to date.Porting VMS Applications to OpenVMS
- Wave arms about.
- Say "Izzy Wizzy let's get busy" !
- That's it.
Windows NT to Windows XP
Windows NT is available for the EISA and PCI bus based Alphas. The NT allegedly stands for New Technology, but it's a bit suspicious that the team leader of Microsoft's WNT team was Dave Cutler who contributed large parts of VMS when he worked for Digital, and if you add one to the character codes, VMS becomes WNT ! Windows NT has many of the features that VMS programmers know and love, and has kernel threads, mutexes, semaphores, critical sections and numerous system service calls to play with.You'll find some Windows XP/Vista/Mobile and VMS freeware on my Free Software Page with more, to come as I get the time to write it.
Switching between the ARC and SRM Consoles
If you have an Alpha machine that you wish to swap between Windows NT and VMS you will need to change the console to the ARC (Windows NT) or the SRM (OpenVMS) console. There are excellent instructions for doing this at the Island Computers web site, which also sells the hardware for upgrading 433a/500a/600a machines, which can run Windows NT or Linux, to 433au/500au/600au machines which can run Windows NT, Linux, Tru64 Unix and OpenVMS. For some models of Alpha, such as the AlphaStation 255, only one console at a time can be held in flash ROM, so it also involves upgrading the firmware. Newer models like the 600au can have both resident at the same time.
Instructions for this are also give in the VMS FAQ at http://rcum.uni-mb.si/~niko/vms/vms_faq.html#MGMT29 or http://eisner.decus.org/vms/data.htm#ALPHA21, for example.
Unix
Digital Unix was formerly known as OSF/1, since it was designed to meet the IEEE Working Group 1003 standards intended to establish a standard operating system interface and environment based on Unix, endorsed by the Open Software Foundation. The current Compaq Unix is known as Tru64. I am not a Unix fan, as you can tell from my web pages.Yezerski Roper
Yezerski Roper Ltd. employed a whole bunch of clever, talented people who could do just about anything with VMS and Windows. Sadly they are no more, and like Merlin, have disappeared into the Pennine Hills until such time as the land is in time of peril, and needs their magic again.VMS Web Links
Here's a few of my favourite web pages related to VMS.- VMS links on my Interesting Links Page
- MadGoat Software - Lots of utilities and the commercial strength MX SMTP Mail Server
- HoffmanLabs - Steve Hoffman was a VMS engineer at HP and a regular contributor to comp.os.vms, and is now an OpenVMS consultant at his company HoffmanLabs
- Montagar Software - Get your free VMS Hobbyist license
- OPCOM's VMS Hobbyist Zone Great tips for setting up your Hobbyist VMS system
- DJE Systems OpenVMS Hobbyist Multia Support page Great advice on getting VMS running on a Multia.
- Raxco VMS Hobbyist Disk Defragmenter
- Purveyor Web Server and MultiNet TCP/IP stack for the VMS Hobbyist
- Ask the OpenVMS Wizards a question
- DECW and VMS CENA Motif/X Windows Software Archive, including XVMSUTILS
- Mirror DECW and VMS CENA Motif/X Windows Software Archive
- Official OpenVMS Freeware Collections
- Jeff Cameron's OpenVMS Pages Good tips and tricks, and a sense of a humour. Try Jeff's VMS System Manager's Quiz!
- Neil Rieck's OpenVMS Pages
- The GNU on VMS Project
- Analog 5.0x for VMS The popular Web Server Log analysis tool
- OpenVMS Mosaic The OpenVMS version of Mosaic, currently 3.6-2 supports frames, client side image maps and HTML 4.0. It's free, with the source code.
- Riken VMS Software archives
- HP User Group (DECUS) UK Home Page
- Encompass (DECUS) US Home Page
- CZL's VMS Page
- Open Source Material & Freeware ported to OPenVMS by Quadratix
- Levitte Programming: VMS - Richard Levitte's excellent pages
- markgoldie.co.uk - OpenVMS Mark Goldie's VMS pages. Like me, Mark is also a BBC Microcomputer fan!
Thanks to David L. Cathey of Montagar Software Concepts, I have been able to add a new item. I converted David's DECUS presentation on how to delete a process stuck in RWAST from PostScript to HTML. It contains numerous useful tips and information and some example code in MACRO. Click on the following link to read David's Resource Waits in the OpenVMS Operating System also known as What to do when you R-WASTed by OpenVMS.
Bibliography
This bibliography is based on postings to the Info-VAX mailing list by Professor David D. Miller, Arne Vajhoj and others, with additions, corrections, and formatting by Richard B. Gilbert. Some books may appear in more than one category. Some books may be out of print.
Introduction to VAX/VMS - for new users
![[New]](../gifs/new.gif)
Advanced VAX/VMS Users
VMS Systems Management
Introduction to VAX/VMS Internals
Advanced VMS Internals
Vol. 1, 1992, ISBN 55558-095-5 (Softcover)
Vol. 2, 1992, ISBN 55558-105-6 (Softcover)
Vol. 3, 1993, ISBN 55558-109-9 (Softcover)
Digital Press.
DCL Books
VAX Architecture and Assembler Language
VMS Books
Motif and X-Windows books
Miscellaneous Books
Publisher Addresses
Contemporary Publishing Co. 508 St. Mary's Street Raleigh NC 27605 Ph: 919-821-4566 Digital Press 80 Montvale Avenue Stoneham, MA 02180 (Call DEC Direct or 1-800-DIGITAL) CBM Books (formerly Professional Press Books) 1300 Virginia Drive, Suite 400 Fort Washington, PA 19034 Ph: 215-643-8105 Ph: 800-285-1755 FAX: 215-643-8099 O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. 103 Morris Street, Suite A Sebastopol, CA 95472 (800) 338-6887 (707) 829-0515 (707) 829-0104 (FAX) PWS-KENT Publishing Company 20 Park Plaza Boston, MA 02116 Van Nostrand Reinhold 115 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10003 (800) 926-2665