Phone Utility on VAX/VMS
marc.vos.netIt's nearly 2022 and the *nix world still doesn't have the seamless clustering support that VMS had in the 80s. K8s gets close, but it's not there quite yet.
Oh, no, it's worse than that: We did have it, but nobody cared enough to maintain it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMosix
I never used it myself, but I was told DEC had transplanted at least part of the clustering tech to Tru64.
Of course, that got cancelled after HP bought Compaq/DEC and did not want to support two Unix systems. IIRC, they promised to port the cluster stuff to HP-UX, but it looks like that never happened.
I really liked Tru64, as it was one of the first UNIXes that took security seriously, but sadly it was killed as you point out.
However at least HP-UX got one of the very first container models, HP-UX Vaults, already in late 1990's.
Nowadays the only thing close to VMS in spirit is Windows, although it requires a good dosis of Windows Internals and MSDN/Technet archelogy to get that point.
Naturally it is only as inspiration, for the real deal OpenVMS.
I keep seeing this a lot. What spirit of VMS survived in Windows ? Security in windows is a disaster, clustering nonexistent, filesystem is edges behind.
Every OS security is a disaster when running as root.
As for everything else, there is enough literature available when one cares to actually learn about it.
http://www0.mi.infn.it/~calcolo/OpenVMS/ssb71/6489/6489p009....
>Each person engaged in the conversation has a viewport on the screen. Phone can display as many as six viewports at a time. The viewport contains information regarding the user's name, the text of the conversation, and various status indicators, such as who is on hold. User names of people that you have on hold can be temporarily eliminated from the screen to make room for new participants.
ANSWER Answers the phone when you receive a call.
DIAL Places a call to another user.
DIRECTORY Displays a list of the users you can call.
EXIT Exits from the Phone utility.
FACSIMILE Includes the contents of a file in your conversation.
HANGUP Cancels the current phone call.
HELP Displays information on how to use the Phone utility.
HOLD Places the other users in a call on hold.
MAIL Sends a message to another user.
PHONE Places a call to another user.
REJECT Rejects a call from another user.
UNHOLD Reverses the previous HOLD command.`phone` and `talk` were two of my favorite things to do on the internet way back in the day. Almost better than IRC was starting up a chat with somebody on the local University VAX or Unix boxes that you had never met before.
This and the .plan/finger posts from a few days ago are playing to the nostalgia of a better time on the internet. :). Iirc you could also do fully animated .plan files on VAXes at the time.
Talk was really easy to use and worked well as I recall. Split screen, real-time communication. It was better than anything available on a PC OS. I remember trying it with someone who knew nothing more about computers than any other student.
Depending on your time perioid, PowWow [1] offered a multi-party talk experience on Windows. It also had a shared painting area and a shared browser experience (IIRC, it just launched the same URL in each participant's browser, which at the time was sufficient; there may have been something that detected new URLs loaded by the host to pass along)
This was substantially similar to Unix Talk, which may be more familiar to people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)
Had an actual chat once via OpenVMS Phone: https://raymii.org/s/blog/My_first_OpenVMS.html#toc_4 - really fun!
Interesting. I have always wanted to own a VAX system but unfortunately they are too expensive to buy and run. And they occupy a lot of space. :(
Some time ago an effort began to port VAX to x86 in emulator. Track down the company that owns the IP redeveloping it and sign-up as a hobbyist user?