Mark Wendt (Contractor) wrote:
>
> Yah, force of habit with me I guess.  I just don't like empty 
> spaces...  Speaking of VMS being stable, I think we held the uptime 
> record here at NRL a few years back for a VAX 600 running VMS.  Last 
> I knew it had an uptime of just a little over 9 years.  Stability and 
> security were the key.  That's why for years the stock exchanges were 
> powered by VMS.  Leave it to DEC/HP/Compaq to let one of the best 
> OS's wither on the vine.  Sorry for the OT:..  Just brings back 
> memories.  Hmmm, wonder if there's an old NIST port of EMC for VMS?  ;-)
>
>   
Yup, sad.  VMS could have made a decent platform for EMC, too.  But, 
Microvaxes were pretty slow, about 1000 times slower than even a 
mediocre Pentium today.  That might be a problem.  I think with just a 
little tweaking of some system parameters, and being careful with what 
system calls you used in the real-time code, you could have run EMC2 
entirely in the normal VMS environment, without the restrictions of 
something like rtai.  VMS was a decent real-time OS from the ground up, 
for the kind of real-time stuff we do with servo interface hardware.  
Never would have hacked it for software step generation, due to CPU speed.

The disk on my MicroVax finally died, but I kept it running from 1986 to 
2007 - 20 YEARS!  ~ 175,000 hours of up-time.  At the end I had flaky 
backplane connectors, and had to reseat boards whenever it crashed to 
get it to boot back up.  Otherwise, it just ran except for power failures.

Jon

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