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On 7 Nov 2007, at 10:25, Tom Potts wrote: > On Wednesday 07 November 2007 09:48, Clare Shepherd wrote: >> I've just read an interesting article in the Make magazine daily >> newsletter about the above. VMS is open now and owned by HP. As it's >> a paid sub, I've posted the news item. I thought some here might find >> it of passing interest. >> >> Gareth Williams, associate director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical >> Observatory Minor Planet Center since 1990, has been tracking the >> 400,000 orbits of known asteroids and comets in the solar system >> using a cluster of 12 VAXes, from offices on the Harvard University >> campus. The Deutsche Börse stock exchange in Frankfurt runs on VMS. >> The Australian Stock Exchange runs on it. The train system in >> Ireland, Irish Rail, runs on it, as does the Amsterdam police >> department. The U.S. Postal Service runs its mail sorters on OpenVMS, >> and Amazon.com uses it to ship 112,000 packages a day. It has "a very >> loyal installed base of customers," says Ann McQuaid, general manager >> of OpenVMS at HP, who shows no signs of wanting to give it up. >> >> If anyone is interested in more here's a link to the original article >> in Information Week: http://www.informationweek.com/news/ >> showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202801794 >> >> Clare > When I was a chip designer with BT in the 80s we used a VAX780 > running VMS > it ran at 1 MIP!!! It catered for ~15 engineers and about 30 > secretaries. > There was an office package on it that was more 'integrated' than > anything > I've seen since. A friend wrote a piece of code for it called > Krunge which > took a document and swapped some of the words for similar sounding > or spelt > words. It was fun watching krunged documents agreed in meetings > despite being > almost meaningless. > I used to have a bit of code that crashed and loaded me up in the > debugger > with what we'd now call su or kernel privileges which was great for > upping > the priority on my batch runs! > Now some 20 years later you can stick windows on a computer 1000 > times as > powerful and your productivity is probably 1/30th of what it was then. > Prettier though... > Tom te tom te tom > > > -- > The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG > http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list > FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html Where I worked we had a systems guy who hated "pretty", saying it was inefficient. I've always iked a nice GUI but there is something to be said for the old spare efficient methods, Maybe we'll go back to that if the energy gets scarce. Who knows? I am fascinated by some of the old software & hardware, I suppose it's my age, sob, sob, sniffle. Clare (in her 60s) Clare -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html