Open VMS

As you can judge from the Past Projects of my homepage as well as from reading my VMS statements I am a VMSfreak. I have started working on this OS in 1989 (VMS 5.1) and gradually worked my way up until OpenVMS 6.2 on Alpha in 2000. My experience grew as well - evolving from a system hacker (in the bad sense of the word) to a system hacker (in the good sense of the word). From the mid-90ies I was doing system programming and system maintainance for VAX and Alpha (and I was having a terrific time ;-) in porting utilities from VAX to Alpha - mostly without any source code left...). Over the years I became our university's VAXorcist - which might explain why I still have a complete orange wall (VMS4.4) and an almost complete grey wall (VMS5.x) stored in my flat (Don't ask - I of course have OpenVMS6.x and 7.3 documentation on CD as well!). Unfortunately our university dumped VMS for Uni* in 2000 so my VMSing came to a sudden halt.

Well, or so they thought...

I'm a DECUS member (of course!) and running my own MicroVAX3300 at home (OpenVMS7.2 at the moment) using a Hobbyist licence. This beautiful machine was dumped by our automated data processing services (with a massive 32 MB RAM and a TK70) and rescued just in time before being scrapped. In addition (as every proper VMSophile) I maintain an account at EISNER:: as well.

And finally... after grabbing one of the wonderful "VMS Forever" stickers during the OpenVMS Tech Update days in 2002 (thanks, Sue!!) I was able to convince the people in our department to finally get back onto VMS's track again (thanks Bill - without your wonderful OS it might have been much harder to convince people that reliability and security are important!). So we have now started web- and file-services on an Alphaserver again (OpenVMS 7.3). Everything is up and running since May 2002, OS upgrade (7.3-2) was done in 2010. More on the Alphaserver here.
P.S.: This page lists some of the Vax/Alpha systems I've worked with...