X-Nico

9 unusual facts about OpenVMS


C0 and C1 control codes

While the C1 control characters are used in conjunction with the ISO/IEC 8859 series of graphical character sets among others, and are integrated into Unicode, they are rarely used directly, except on specific platforms such as OpenVMS.

OpenVMS

Roger Gourd was the project lead for the Starlet program, with software engineers Dave Cutler (who would later lead development of Microsoft's Windows NT), Dick Hustvedt, and Peter Lippman acting as the technical project leaders, each having responsibility for a different area of the operating system.

OpenVMS has a very feature-rich file system, with support for stream and record-oriented IO, ACLs, and file versioning.

Many components and applications may also encounter field-length-related date problems at year 10000 (see the Year 10,000 problem).

OpenVMS provides various security features and mechanisms, including security identifiers, resource identifiers, subsystem identifiers, ACLs, and detailed security auditing and alarms.

Specific versions evaluated at DoD NCSC Class C2 and, with the SEVMS security enhanced services support, at NCSC Class B1, per the NCSC Rainbow Series.

Sequence And Batch Language

The Sequence And Batch Language (SABL) is used on Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) systems running OpenVMS.

The Cuckoo's Egg

Studying his log book, Stoll saw that the hacker was familiar with VMS, as well as AT&T Unix.

Transbase

The wide use of Transbase, especially as basis for repair part management and documentation systems in the automobile industry soon led to a considerable number of ports to diverse operating systems, such as UNIX derivatives, Linux, Windows, VMS, and Mac OS.


Condusiv Technologies

The company was formerly known as Diskeeper Corporation, a name derived from its flagship product, Diskeeper, a file-system defragmentation software package for Microsoft Windows and OpenVMS.

CorVision

CorVision was developed by Cortex Corporation for the VAX/VMS ISAM environment.

DIGITAL Command Language

It had its roots in the IAS, TOPS-20, and RT-11 operating systems and was implemented as a standard across most of Digital's operating systems, notably RSX-11, but took its most powerful form in the OpenVMS operating system.

HP BASIC for OpenVMS

When DEC was purchased by Compaq in 1997/98, the products were renamed Compaq BASIC for OpenVMS VAX and Compaq BASIC for OpenVMS Alpha.

Likewise, when Compaq merged with HP in 2001/02, the products were renamed HP BASIC for OpenVMS on VAX and HP BASIC for OpenVMS on AlphaServer.

HP Integrity Servers

CD/DVD-ROM (required for installation of Windows Server 2003 and OpenVMS)

Maximum Integrated Data Acquisition System

The system currently runs under Linux, MS Windows, various versions of UNIX, VMS, VxWorks and MS-DOS and can be ported easily to virtually any operating system which supports TCP/IP sockets.

Shar

In 1987, Michael Bednarek from The Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne developed a script for a similar purpose in the DIGITAL Command Language for the VMS operating system under the name "VMS Shar version 2".

Xitami

Xitami was designed to be portable, and was ported to Windows, Linux and other Unices, OpenVMS, BeOS, and OS/2.


see also