My Desktop OS: OpenVMS with CDE (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

NewsForge takes a look at OpenVMS. "Low cost: My desktop runs on the world's fastest workstation (as of 11 years ago). This investment, injected with a few expense dollars, has paid dividends 24x7 for years. Countless x86s and MIPSes have been come and gone, and the killer OS of the time was entombed long ago, yet critical software continues to run even on new hardware. Other OSes are camouflaged as backward-compatible, and porting existing software to these new versions is commonplace. OpenVMS's middle name is "backward compatible"; it continues to run the same 64-bit images that I compiled years ago."

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My Desktop OS: OpenVMS with CDE (NewsForge)

Posted Apr 6, 2006 14:47 UTC (Thu) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (1 responses)

Despite the URL this article was posted on April 1. It is intended as humour.

My Desktop OS: OpenVMS with CDE (NewsForge)

Posted Apr 6, 2006 16:56 UTC (Thu) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link]

And like all good humor, there's enough truth in it to make you think twice. While the CLI sucked big time (no pipes, no redirection - if a command didn't provide a "/output=" option (or equivalent, because each command got to do it's own thing), you were semi-screwed (not competely, there was always the "define/user SYS$OUTPUT ..." dance), the actual OS level was extremely capable and reliable. None the Unix/Linux/whatever clustering systems are even close to what VMS had in the 80s.

Too bad DEC's marketing and management sucked so hard.