Newbie to VMS !!! Help me

[Alexander_84]

hello all,
i was trying to find a good forum for OpenVMS. i am new to this OS. could anyone tell me why this os has been named as Virtual Memory System? Is it Open source OS?

any help gr8ly appreciated.

[Wim Van den Wyngaert · Accepted solution]

VMS uses virtual memory,t.i. you can address more memory than your physical memory. Now all computers have that but 25 years ago it was relatively new.
No open source, HP keeps them closed for most people.

[Alexander_84]

Ok. Thanks. Then, why do we include Open before VMS? What does it mean?

Thnks in advance.

[Uwe Zessin]

About 1991/1992. VMS was enhanced to support a POSIX environment that was modelled after Unix. Unix-like systems were often called 'Open Systems'. The illusion was that the end-user could throw out his original hardware-vendor and choose a new one because "Unix is portable". Bla, Bla, Bla - and so on.

Of course he usually had traded this pseudo-independence from the platfrom provider to another one, e.g. a database vendor.

[Jan van den Ende]

To complete Uwe's story:
... and some marketing "guru's" decided that it would be great to confuse everybody, and give the competition some fine weapons against VMS, by officially renaming it to OpenVMS. There were horrible stories about the tremendously complicated upgrade from VMS to OpenVMS, while in practise, after some small patch, suddenly the system announcement read OpenVMS instead of VMS..
But the damage was done! Great marketing!.

Jan

[Uwe Zessin]

OpenVMS VAX V5.5-2 did announce itself as VAX/VMS V5.5-2 during boot. The 'small' patch is called "OpenVMS VAX V6.0" ;-)

[Alexander_84]

Thanks all for your kind help. Now, is there any command to find out the version on VMS? (though i know that the version installed in my host is VMS V7.2-1).

Any help greatly appreciated.

[Mac Lilley]

Alexander

you can do
$ show system/noprocess
or
$ write sys$output f$getsyi("version")
Regards
ML

[Uwe Zessin]

$ show system/noprocess
OpenVMS V7.3-1 on node ATHENA 5-AUG-2004 15:26:18.52 Uptime 53 06:21:02
$ write sys$output f$getsyi("version")
V7.3-1
$

[Bojan Nemec]

Hi,

The simpliest way is:

$ SHOW SYSTEM

And in the first line you get the version.

Another way is:

$ write sys$output F$GETSYI("VERSION")


Bojan