At 01:23 PM 4/29/2009, you wrote: >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 6000 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
Jon, Did you ever get to play around with the Alpha machines? We had a bunch of Alpha 8400's with the cross-bar back-planes on them, set up as a cluster (I still think VMS did the best job of clustering out of any of the OS's out there). We could hot swap practically any component from memory, to CPU's, to drives, to certain special interfaces we used, and even power supplies. The thing I like best about clustering was you could do rolling upgrades, or rolling patches, without having to take the entire system down. The Alpha's were much, much faster than the VAX's. We had a couple of VAX clusters up and running while we moved everything over to the new Alpha clusters, and side by side comparisons of 800,000 block data chunks was an eye watering experience watching the Alpha's process the data vs the VAX's. Course the Alpha 8400's had a minimum of 8 CPU's in them, versus the 2 for the VAX 6000's. An awesome hunk of heavy metal, and a bullet-proof OS to boot. Leave it to marketing to completely ruin a great thing. Mark ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Register Now & Save for Velocity, the Web Performance & Operations Conference from O'Reilly Media. Velocity features a full day of expert-led, hands-on workshops and two days of sessions from industry leaders in dedicated Performance & Operations tracks. Use code vel09scf and Save an extra 15% before 5/3. http://p.sf.net/sfu/velocityconf _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
