On Mon, 23 Mar 2009, J.MAHENDRA NAG wrote: > > Hi All, > > What is openvms? > Can we install it on any intel platform like linux? > How far is it different from a typical linux? >
OpenVMS is one of the finest operating systems out there. It is well known for its reliability, solid performance, well designed architecture, security and above all distributed computing and clustering. OpenVMS comes from the line of VAX/VMS systems which are some of the most secure systems. You will be happy to know that CRIS (Computerised Reservation and Information System) of Indian railways runs a OpenVMS cluster. OpenVMS can be installed on an Itanium (IA-64) based hardware platform, but not on intel64/amd64 or 32-bit architecture. The POSIX interface is available on OpenVMS.Most of the Open Source tools, compiler tool chain, openSSL, Firefox etc. have been ported on OpenVMS and work very fine. The extent of difference can be described as: OpenVMS is what happens when supercomputing engineers design OS for high-end hardware. Linux is what happens when PC geeks copy OS features/ideas for commodity Intel hardware. If you were to login into an OpenVMS system and try this command rm *, it will give you an error , whereas on a Linux system the files would have got deleted. OpenVMS has a record oriented subsytem which also does versioning. So if you edit a file multiple times, you have effectively created multiple versions of the same file. There used to be a page maintained by Neil Rieck of Canada http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/vms_vs_unix.html This will give you a very good comparative idea. Most of the unique features of OpenVMS have been slowly copied by Linux and free enthusiasts. For all the details, please download the OpenVMS documentation from the HP site at http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/index.html Hope this helps. thanks Saifi.
