Talk:OpenVMS

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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the OpenVMS article.
OpenVMS was a good article, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these are addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Delisted version: No date specified. To provide a date use: {{DelistedGA|insert date in any format here}}


Contents

[edit] Older comments

I will be doing some work on this page in the (near) future... in particular things like RMS need to be split out into their own pages (RMS isn't VMS-specific), and there's quite a bit more that could be said (see glossary list for some examples...). Lady Lysine Ikinsile 03:16, Jun 8, 2004 (UTC)

When you do this edit, please note that Cutler was not a solo designer of VMS, it was a team effort, of which he was a member. I do not have the whole list available, unfortunately. solak 18:21, Jul 16, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Peter Conklin?

IIRC, Peter Conklin was also a member of VAX-A, although I can't remember whether his contribution was on the software, hardware, or overall system-architecture side(s). Perhaps someone who really knows can chime in?

Atlant 03:16, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Missing information

I don't know anything about computers, but i love browsing wikipedia to learn more. I've heard of VMS, but after reading this article I still don't know what it is or what it's good for or why it existed or if it still exists or who uses it and why - these are important things in an encyclopedia article, and i hope somebody adds them. ZacharyS 17:30, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

Added. -Hoff, 27-Nov-2006

OpenVMS is used by hospitals including the New Orleans Veteran's Administration Hospital and East Jefferson General Hospital. It is also used by the U.S. Navy Reserve for a part of their personnel records management process. Monsanto used it for a long time as a central system for agricultural research, though I must admit I've lost track of my contact at the St. Louis Monsanto facilities. Hubble image processing was managed by an OpenVMS for a while though with the Hubble telescope in its declining years, I don't know what they are using now. Again, I've lost track of my contact at LRL. Some OpenVMS machines were used at the Stennis facility in southern Mississippi to do image processing (using a variant of the Patterson Projection algorithm that computes shapes given reflection data.)

If you visit the OpenVMS support page at HP you will see lots of European and Asian posts to go with USA sites.

The Doc Man 18:10, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Delisted GA

There are no references. slambo 10:30, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Eh?

There are plenty of cross-references to other sources of information about VMS. Are you just saying that there's no "section" labeled Sources?

Solak 17:44, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

I expect this was the "good article" de-listing. As for what "there are no references" means, Slambo might want to elaborate on that detail. -Hoff 27-Nov-2006.

First, apologies for taking so long to reply; I don't have this page on my watchlist. An anon left a note on my talk today requesting clarification.
Links to other Wikipedia articles are not considered references. An External links or See also section does not indicate to the reader that the resources mentioned there were used as references in creating the article; the items listed therein are assumed to be places where a user might find more information that isn't necessarily contained in the article. All source material that is used to create an article needs to be listed in a separate References section with appropriate inline citations to correlate the references to specific, verifiable statements in the article text. The relevant guidelines here are Wikipedia:Verifiability and Wikipedia:Citing sources; the templates in Category:Citation templates can also be used to present a uniform appearance to the references that are cited. In general one citation per paragraph has been mentioned when discussing citation requirements for Wikipedia:Good articles (the archives of Wikipedia talk:Good articles and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Good articles include several discussions about references). Wherever possible, it's best to use resource material that is published in paper form (books and journal articles) versus strictly online form; since the OpenVMS name has been in use since (according to the article) at least 1991, there should be plenty of dead-tree edition titles to make a well resourced reference list.
Please keep in mind that the Good articles criteria now includes (as of Summer 2006) a requirement for inline citations to verifiable references. If you're working toward Featured quality, this requirement is even more necessary.
For examples of what I'm thinking of for articles about software, both the GNOME and KDE articles contain what I would consider a good amount of references, and the TeX article is even better with several printed resources by different authors in its references list. Slambo (Speak) 21:21, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

I find it amusing — even verging on the ironic — that a Wikipedian would be seeking “dead-tree” references, particularly for an article on computing technologies. That aside, there are now added numbers of references to these “dead-tree” resources — both in-line and in a new bibliography at the end of the article — though these “dead-tree” references far more difficult to locate than the on-line references. (There are far more books on trains and on train-spotting in your average bookstore than there are on OpenVMS, for instance.) There are now yet more on-line references added, as well. Both in-line references, and at the end of the article. -Hoff 3-Dec-2006

[edit] Standards

It should be worthwhile to link basic VMS technologies like FMS, RMS etc to their ANSI/ISO standards. For example, FMS is based on an older text console handling / layout standard. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 64.128.27.67 (talk • contribs) 22:27, 5 May 2006 (UTC2)

RMS isn't an ANSI/ISO standard, and has no relationship to same. Several hunks underneath RMS, such as the magtape and CD-ROM processing, do have associated standards. FMS is a layered product, and not part of OpenVMS itself. I've added a list of various of the applicable ISO/ANSI/FIPS/FED standards claimed by the HP OpenVMS folks, and it may or may not be complete or current. -Hoff 27-Nov-2006.

[edit] Unicode

What kind of support does OpenVMS have for Unicode? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.116.98.179 (talk • contribs) 18:08, 10 September 2006 (UTC2)

Relatively minimal. See the current C Run-time library reference manual at http://www.hp.com/go/openvms/doc/ for details on the wide character and related character conversion support. The file system on current releases (when ODS-5 is selected) can have Unicode characters within the filenames, though this is only used by a very few select products. Within the file contents, you can store whatever data you want, whether Unicode or otherwise. Most tools that process files do not have Unicode support. (I did not add this discussion into the edit I just did.) -Hoff 27-Nov-2006

[edit] OpenVMS support being wound way down

[1] If VMS is all but unsupported starting next week, this may deserve mention in the article - David Gerard 13:48, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

The Inquirer article does not say that support is being wound down. It does suggest some support is moving to call centres in India which isn't the same thing. My insurance company handles my calls in India but that doesn't mean it's winding down. In any case The Inquirer has reported this news before so we just have to wait and see.Citizensmith 14:10, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

HP has documented software support plans through (at least) 2011, per its published roadmaps. See the current OpenVMS roadmap available at [2] for current details. -Hoff 27-Nov-2006

I think it's fair to say that VMS's userbase has been declining rapidly for at least a decade, and that HP will drop it as soon as its contractual obligations expire. It'd be useful if the page made some mention of this. Mkcmkc 22:11, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

You'd need a reliable source and H-P probably isn't talking and Terry Shannon's dead. You'll know support has ended the day that H-P announces it to the remaining customer base.
Atlant 23:46, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Security Evaluations

"High level of security with versions evaluated at DoD NCSC Class C2 and, with the SEVMS security enhanced services support, at NCSC Class B1, per the NCSC Rainbow Series"

I think some links or references to that statement need to be added, its not that i doubt it.

Allix Davis    Thu Sep 21 13:27:00 BST 2006
Howzabout:
Atlant 12:58, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

NCSC and Common Criteria citations added. -Hoff 27-Nov-2006

[edit] Logo

Whilst there have been shark logos associated with OpenVMS in the past, the one shown currently on the article is a copyvio from a Japanese (?) artist. The image is likely lifted from a Hobbyist site, I'm not sure who originally adapted the image to associate it with VMS, but it does have its afficianados. --Brianmc 22:37, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

There are other logos posted over at [3]. I do not know what copyrights are in effect for those materials, or for the [4] "official" logo over at the HP OpenVMS web site. AFAIK, the swoosh is the only current HP official logo. The shark logos aren't current or official, per various HP folks. I'll leave it for somebody else to hack out the current shark logo. -Hoff 27-Nov-2006

I was reminded of this issue because a recent editor pointed out that the logo is not a current HP logo. In fact, I don't believe that particular image it was ever used by DEC, Compaq, or HP. Plus, since that logo is copyrighted by Hajime Sorayama, I don't believe it should be used here at all -- I'm surprised the Wikipedia Copyright Police haven't cracked down on it yet. I've replaced it with the freeware shark image that was originally from [5]. -- CWesling 04:57, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Regarding the use of Digital Command Language

In the main article, someone noted that some system operations can even be performed using the command scripting language, DCL. This is true but doesn't cover the half of what DCL can really do. Because DCL uses the same exact string paradigms as BASIC and is capable of integer math, it is possible to do some very complex parsing and other types of analysis via the scripting language. However, interpretive scripting overhead is ugly. The neat part about DCL is that, since it is so close to BASIC, it is often trivial to whip up a quick-and-dirty script in DCL just to get it working, then convert it to compiled BASIC for efficiency. The common language interface means you could also do the same for other target languages, but it happens that the BASIC string and file operations are so close to DCL that it is almost a "natural" prototyping environment. Further, DCL is capable of manipulating environmental variables, so it is possible to use DCL as a supporting environment for programs, making them much simpler. A feature not described very much in the main article is the LOGICAL NAME concept. Other operating systems might refer to these as aliases. In general, a logical name is a synonym for something else. The logical name can list a single translation or multiple translations for the same name. In the latter case, the name is referred to as a search list. Logical names can be used to generalize programs. For instance, in UNIX environments, you can easily send input or output streams to / from files via various methods. In OpenVMS, you can redirect SYS$OUTPUT to capture output files, or SYS$INPUT for input data streams, and other SYS$xxx logical names exist as well. Thus, it is possible to use a script to redirect the standard input and output rather than having to make the programs smart enough to ask for or otherwise determine where files should be. Because logical names have scoping rules, it is possible to have a system-wide environment for something but then override it with a more localized scope of the same logical name. For instance, a production ORACLE database might be defined at the SYSTEM level, but a given job might define the same exact symbol set to point to a test ORACLE database. Because of scope search rules, the more localized versions "win" when they exist. But if they don't exist, you see the SYSTEM-level names and use the production database instead.

The Doc Man 18:23, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Worms

I'm not an expert in the area, but I feel that there should be a section on computer worms that attacked VMS. At least two I know of are the WANK worm and the Father Christmas worm. ~AFA ʢűčķ¿Ю 11:39, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] ftp.digital.com

It seems that HP has retired the server that runs ftp.digital.com. The announcement can be found here: http://h18002.www1.hp.com/alphaserver/options/asgs1280/asgs1280_options.html

The ftp service is now inaccessible. The ftp.digital.com link at the bottom of this page should be replaced with another link that provides the same information if possible, or removed. Rilak (talk) 08:04, 28 February 2008 (UTC)