In 1986, DEC added VAXclustering support to their MicroVAX minicomputers, running over Ethernet instead of special-purpose hardware. While not giving the high-availability advantages of the CI hardware, these ”Local Area VAXclusters” provided an attractive expansion path for buyers of low-end minicomputers.

Later versions of OpenVMS (V5.0 and later) supported “mixed interconect” VAXclusters (using both CI and Ethernet), and VAXclustering over DSSI (Digital Systems and Storage Interconnect) and FDDI, among other transports. Eventually, as high-bandwidth wide area networking became available, clustering was extended to allow satellite data links and long-distance terrestrial links. This allowed the creation of ”disaster-tolerant clusters”; by locating the single VAXcluster in several diverse geographical areas, the cluster could survive infrastructure failures and natural disasters.

VAXclustering was greatly aided by the introduction of terminal servers using the LAT protocol. By allowing ordinary serial terminals to access the host nodes via Ethernet, it became possible for any terminal to rapidly and easily connect to any host node. This made it much simpler to accomplish fail over of the user terminals from one node of the cluster to another.

Eventually, VAXclusters reached the point where the cluster as a whole essentially never went down. ”Rolling upgrades” even allowed the system operators to upgrade the OpenVMS system software, shutting down, upgrading, and rebooting individual nodes while the cluster as a whole continued processing. Cluster uptimes are frequently measured in years with the current longest uptime being at least twelve years.

As mentioned above, OpenVMS now also runs on Alpha and IA-64 systems, so the term ”VAXcluster” has been replaced by ”VMScluster”. With Gigabit Ethernet now common and 10-gigabit Ethernet being introduced, standard networking cables and cards are quite sufficient to support VMSclustering.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article VMScluster, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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The application ran on terminal with plaintext 24×80.

The first version was able to hyperlinking between files.

ENQUIRE was written in the Pascal programming language and implemented on a Norsk Data NORD-10 under SINTRAN III and version 2 was later ported to MS-DOS and to VAX/VMS.

==Further Reading

*

Adapted from the Wikipedia article ENQUIRE, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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FreeVMS is a free software clone of the VMS computer operating system, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. As of 2009, the project is in the early stages of development. The latest version is 0.3.15.

It consists of a kernel (planned to be POSIX-compliant) and a DCL command-line interpreter.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article FreeVMS, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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DECtape, originally called Microtape, was a magnetic tape data storage medium used with many Digital Equipment Corporation computers, including the PDP-6, PDP-8, LINC-8, PDP-10, PDP-11, PDP-12, and the PDP-15. VAX/VMS support for it was implemented but did not become an official part of the product. DECtapes were 3/4 inch wide and formatted into blocks of data that could be read or written individually. One tape stored 184K 12-bit PDP-8 words or 144K 18-bit words. Block size was 129 12-bit words (for the 12-bit machines), or 256 18-bit words for the other machines (16, 18, 32, or 36 bit systems). From a programming point of view, DECtape behaved like a very slow disk drive.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article DECtape, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Netpbm is an open source package of graphics programs and a programming library, used mainly in the Unix world. It is a highly portable package, working under many Unix platforms, Windows, Mac OS X, VMS, Amiga OS and others and is included in all major open source Unix-like operating system distributions.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Netpbm, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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The original version was written at the University of Oklahoma by Robert Alan Koeneke and Jimmey Wayne Todd, after they became hooked on ”Rogue” but could not run it on the VAX-11/780 minicomputer to which they had access.

Version 1.0 was written in VMS Pascal and completed in the summer of 1983. From around 1985 the source code was widely distributed under a license that permitted sharing and modification but not commercial use. Koeneke’s last release was ”Moria 4.7” in 1986 or 1987, although more recent versions have been compiled by a variety of authors. ”Moria” inspired a number of derivative versions. Jim E. Wilson created ”Umoria”, a modified version in C for UNIX and MS-DOS. At the University of Washington a modified Pascal version named ”Imoria” was developed, which has been ported to C by Steve Kertes.

The current maintainer of Moria is David Grabiner.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Moria (video game), under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Both Red Hat and Oracle have developed clustering software for Linux.

OCFS2, the Oracle Cluster File System was added to the official Linux kernel with version 2.6.16, in January 2006. The alpha-quality code warning on OCFS2 was removed in 2.6.19.

Red Hat’s cluster software, including their DLM and Global File System was officially added to the Linux kernel with version 2.6.19, in November 2006.

Both systems use a DLM modeled on the venerable VMS DLM. Oracle’s DLM has a simpler API. (the core function, dlmlock, has eight parameters, whereas the VMS SYS$ENQ service and Red Hat’s dlm_lock both have 11.)

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Distributed lock manager, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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VMU, or Visual Memory Unit is a memory card peripheral for the Dreamcast. Its official name was changed by Sega for each of the three key regions:-

* Japan = Visual Memory System (VMS)

* USA = Visual Memory Unit (VMU)

* Europe = Visual Memory (VM)

The name was changed from VMS to VMU for the USA market as the name VMS was already owned and in use by the Digital Equipment Corporation for their VMS operating system. It is not known why the name was changed again to VM for the European market.

While its most basic function is as a removable storage device the VMU may also serve as an auxiliary display during normal gameplay and, through use of additional software, act as a handheld game console. Console-like features of the VMU include a small black and white screen, speaker, directional pad, and four buttons. Also the ability to download additional games makes the VMU fall under the same jurisdiction as a game system. They were initially only available in white, but expanded to transparent Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Black and many other color variations.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article VMU, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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“China red” is another name for the pigment vermilion, which is the traditional red pigment of Chinese art. Chinese name chops are printed with a red cinnabar paste, and vermilion (or cinnabar) is the pigment used in Chinese red lacquer. Cinnabar also has significance in Taoist culture, and was regarded as the color of life and eternity.

Displayed at right is the web color orange-red, which has a special significance in hacker culture. The documentation for Digital Equipment Corporation’s VMS Version 4 came in memorable, distinctively colored orangish-reddish ring binders, and “China red” was Digital’s official name for this color. However, Mark Crispin seems to claim Digital’s name for the color was Terracotta, at least in the context of the PDP-10 machines running Tops-20.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Vermilion, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Lynx was a product of the Distributed Computing Group within Academic Computing Services of the University of Kansas, and was initially developed in 1992 by a team of students at the university (Lou Montulli, Michael Grobe and Charles Rezac) as a hypertext browser used solely to distribute campus information as part of a ”Campus-Wide Information Server” and for browsing the Gopher space. Beta availability was announced to Usenet on 22 July 1992. In 1993 Montulli added an Internet interface and released a new version (2.0) of the browser.

Garrett Blythe created DosLynx in April 1994 and later joined the Lynx effort as well. Foteos Macrides ported much of Lynx to VMS and maintained it for a time. In 1995, Lynx was released under the GNU General Public License, and is now maintained by a group of volunteers led by Thomas Dickey.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Lynx (web browser), under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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