Happy Birthday!

30 years.

30 years ago - give or take a few days - Digital Equipment Corporation introduced the VAX 11-780, running their brand new VMS operating system.

That's "VAX' as in "Virtual Address eXtension" and VMS as "Virtual Memory System".

"Virtual" as in "the system acts like it has more memory than it really has", something that we take for granted these days.

Though not the first system to use virtual memory, it was one of the first popular ones.

VMS was the system on which I first "cut my teeth" (so to speak) - I worked on it a couple of years in college, then professionally for a couple of years (and, arguably, I've been working on NT-class systems for quite a while).

So, I'd like to take this opportunity to wish VMS (now, "OpenVMS") a happy 30th birthday.

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 07, 2007
  LOL, Thanks this brings back some memories. Some good some bad. While I started programming back on the old Apple 2 when I was 8, the VAX was the first real system I used in college. I got a directory there I could put stuff in, it wasn't long until a bunch of us working on programs discovered we could set the permissions on our directories and share them out hence creating our first web pages. This was also the first real remote system I could VT terminal emulation to get into so I could work on my ADA code at home which, boy I was one advanced student since I didn't have to come to campus every night and work in the computer labs and my 386 I had at home could connect to school. Of course I had to then send print jobs to the master printers to print my code out on that huge green bar paper which would then get deposited in my locker there mysteriously sometime in the middle of the night. However I have to tell you thinking about programming back then I sure do appreciate Visual Studio. If for nothing else than being able to find where I left off that semicolon. Many of hours did I spend looking for that missing semicolon or punctuation problems.