OpenVMS on x86 is now available for hobbyists! Almost a year after the official release. This is a part 1 of my getting started guide, showing you how to install OpenVMS on VirtualBox on Windows 10/11. More parts will follow, documenting license installation, network setup, ssh, application installation etc.
If you’ve been wanting to get your feet wet with the new OpenVMS x86 release – like I am – this series of articles is the one place to start.
If you’re not registered as a hobbyist, well, the option isn’t yet available for x86. There is a greyed out button, though, and it says “x86 (Planned)”
So, perhaps in a few days…
IDK, it seems like he says you have to register, then you can download it. But yes the checkbox is greyed out. We
‘ll see what happens. Its a bit disappointing you have to disable hyper V, but I think I have a spare win 10 install I can use this without hyper V.
Its not Greyed out anymore…
But it does require a human to review your application to register as a hobbiest… This is not wise thinking. How can I really be a VMS hobbyist without access to … VMS ? I hope they follow the bread crumbs I left in my application and read this. Hi VMSSoftware! Love your product, please provide us a way of using it.
I used VMS in college. I thought it was a little clunky compared to UNIX, but it sure does what it does well. it would be a shame for kids today not to know about VMS
Same. Everyone had to use VAX in order to use email. That was pretty hard core. It was really sad how proud the university was that we had a VAX based email system. They replaced it with a IBM AIX system and everyone rejoiced and marveled at the wonders of PINE.
I had to use it on IA64, when working with a lab in grad school. The guy who ran that research group had written a bunch of VLSI tools in VMS back during VAX days, and they never got around to even bother porting it to anything modern.
The command line took a while to get used to coming from unix/windows. It clearly felt it was stuck back in the early 70s or so. You could tell that the people who made it originally had just discovered “interactivity” and were still stuck in a world of batch systems. That it was the case still on the IA64 version of OpenVMS makes me thing that has always been the case. And that the shell is much more coupled with the rest of the system than in Unix, where you have a choice of ways to interact with the operating system.
It did have some neat things, like the file revisioning built into the filesystem. So it acted as a sort of archaic revision control system (even if it was not distributed).
Overall, I assume there may be some value proposition somewhere. But since this seems entirely expected to be ran on a virtual machine, I would think it’s just a way to keep some old legacy applications still running. As developing on OpenVMS, when we had to do some bug fixing for the tools we used, seemed straight from the early 80s. Which is nuts.
I had to use it too. It was the opposite of Unix in my opinion back then (1988): unelegant, big and full of special commands and system calls. Not the “everything is a file” paradigm, no paradigm at all, just a huge collection of system calls with a huge number of parameters each. The shell had all commands built-in instead of calling small external commands as in Unix. I was happy when I didn't have to use it anymore.