[GTALUG] Windows Terminal: Everything you need to know now - TechRepublic
Stewart C. Russell
scruss at gmail.com
Tue Jun 9 19:27:40 EDT 2020
On 2020-06-09 11:46 a.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
>
> Googling for VAX VMS DCL gets you a number of references to DEC
> Command Language.
>
> Don't bother to look at them: it's dead and gone.
Is not! You take that back ... ;-)
OpenVMS 9 for x86_64 was released recently. You're unlikely to see it
unless you're in very niche banking and healthcare applications, though.
But the Win2k kernel owes more than a little to VMS, and some of the
low-level Windows tools bear a striking resemblance to VMS command line
tools.
As a hobbyist, you can't currently get an OS for your legacy VAX
hardware (or emulation on Raspberry Pi), as the licensing scheme has
recently fallen over. It should be back up soon, though.
My brother was doing some consulting in the last decade for a well-known
prestige British car maker. They had some really ancient equipment. My
brother was auditing their systems, and they had a very important
body-panel press controller that no-one could find. They eventually
traced the wiring from the control terminal to a junk-filled room. Under
the junk was a smallish VAX that had been running undisturbed since the
1980s.
I still miss VMS's file versioning; edit FILE.TXT;1 and you'd get a new
file FILE.TXT;2 appear as well. Opening FILE.TXT would always open the
most recent version. So very simple and solid.
cheers,
Stewart
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