I think you have identified the critical essence of the pervasive survival of the greater English empire. Without the ceremony of tea there would have been no civilization today. Not that there's much anyway.
As to your questions: Yes, VMS is Digital Equipment Corporation's proprietary operating system and therein lies its greatness as well as its great tragedy. VMS was designed to run on all sizes of hardware platforms, well so long as you don't look inside its guts to minutely. To the common ordinary geek VMS is VMS whether on a desktop system or a multi-cpu mainframe. Because it was "owned" it was well supported by the builder, but they gouged their market, and made enemies of their customer base especially on the West Coast, where Sun took to an opposite tack and provided an affordable alternative based on Unix, the multi-user multi-tasking OS of the masses, well of the geek masses. VMS was designed by engineers for engineers long after IBM and the BUNCH* built their first wave technology. IBM OS's never considered including the first two digits of the calendar year because that data was too costly in memory and storage space. Finance types (their market) didn't care either in the 50s and 60s.
Engineer's on the other-hand have a fascination with the obtuse. VMS's internal clock is built upon Star Trek's Star-date calendar, so I've been taught. Star-date One is Nov. 11th 1859 and every Vax that screws up its calender on a reboot or otherwise will revert its clock back to this date. All internal date stamping carries a four digit value for the year, so no Y2K opportunities lay at their OS level. This is not to say that all applications are so clever as to utilize this feature, and knowing what cludging programmers are capable of doing, there's probably plenty of Unix and Vax/VMS computers running software that'll break by 2000.
Regarding Intel, I was speaking of the time before computers...Or at least of the advent of personal computers. In 1980 Intel had a couple of Apple IIs in house, probably secreted in by marketing types ( as these contained microprocessors from the enemy - MOT). I found one and was running a soaring simulation package on it at night. Shortly thereafter we sold our old obsolete 8080 processor chip products to IBM for making a competitive rebuttal to Apple in exchange for $250M and a business relationship started. We (Intel) all thought those first PCs as clunky old stuff as we were already selling 8086s (think, whoa! hotstuff! ) These were early generation processor chips of the family that eventually spawned the Pentium and its siblings. As IBM built their first PCs, Intel in a wave of support early-on started adopting these for use at the desktop, and this was what necessitated the standards setting. The company didn't want to buy a bunch of unsupported and incompatible hardware. So a group of us were enlisted to specify which pieces of hardware and what software would be blessed to be used within Intel's first internally used PCs.
In Asia I've worked for National Semiconductor, Intel, Sierra Semiconductor and Chartered Semiconductor, so far. Please put in any good word you can think of, I'd love to go back.
Backup Logs. Backups are things you do if you want to keep your job when running computers. Backup Logs tell you if they are worth the media they are written upon, or if you need to brush up your resume.
Utah on another subject is definitely God's gift to skiers. The powder is beyond description...was there two weeks ago, and the canyon I was in locked down, all skiers forced off the hills into lodges, Sheriff's orders one Saturday afternoon, as avalanches had swept over a parking lot covering 50 cars. Snowbird the resort I was at, accommodated an extra 4000 "guests" that night, at least they provided some with blankets. We were under house-arrest. No inter-lodge movement allowed. They turned their howitzers towards the opposite canyon walls and were lobbing charges into the hills all afternoon and evening. It was pleasant drinking beers to the sound of the echoing concussion until we realized the only bathroom access was through the guarded outside door, eventually we prevailed. Skiing was superior the next couple of days, although we probably developed some pretty noticable body aromas, but when you're cutting fresh tracks in 2-3 foot of virginal snow who the heck cares. Going back in two weeks for more of the same, I hope.
National had some fabs there, probably still does. I just noticed an Intel building off I-15 in Sandy, Utah on this last trip. Novell's hdqs is located there, and of course numerous software and peripheral companies hail from there too.
Regards, Mike
* BUNCH - for those that are not old enough to remember, Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDC and Honeywell - the erstwhile competitors that IBM clobbered in the dash for Corporate America's financial computing business. |
