Dr. Phil's Dreamwidth Journal

Announcement

The university's e-newsletter included the following note yesterday:

Thursday, 04 April, 2013

The OpenVMS computing environment (vms.wmich.edu, also known by service names Winnie, Kanga and Pooh) will be removed from general service April 30.

Once there were VMS computer domains on campus named Winnie, Kanga, Roo, Piglet and Pooh. I ended up using Piglet until it was retired, then Kanga after that, until they migrated the university e-mail over to other servers. In the early 90s, I still had FORTRAN programs that I ran on the VMS computers, and I seem to recall that one of the VMS machines ran a Gopher server I used in one of my grad classes when I was working on a 2nd Ph.D. in Science Education for a time.

Before that, of course, we were using Digital Equipment Corporation DEC VAX-11/750 hardware at the Center for Experimental Communication at Michigan Tech. VAX-A was the main machine for Physics when I started there in the Fall of 1984 and had a Floating Point Systems FPS-164MAX array processor attached for doing calculations. The VAX-11/750 was a very nice box, looking like a washer/dryer pair with one of hard drive boxes next to it. I was amused to learn that a couple of CS students bought VAX-B and VAX-C from the university when they were retired for a couple of hundred bucks and had all this network hardware installed in the living room of the house they were renting in Calumet Township. (grin)

Learning VMS in the mid-80s was very handy for when we finally bought our first IBM Personal Computer around 1986, because some of the command structure that PC-DOS/MS-DOS used was derived from VMS. And ten years later when I started doing serious work on Pentium-class PCs, Windows NT4 was developed by some of the same people who made VMS so stable.

In my Northwestern days in the late 70s, there were lots of DEC machines around the EE and CS departments. The CS network lab was a loose assemblage of DEC PDP-8s and PDP/LSI-11s. And around 1979, I think it was, Vogelback Computer Center, which housed the big iron Control Data CDC-6400 and CDC-6600 machines I worked with, decided to buy a pair of those newfangled VAX-11/750s and set them up in a spare room and let anyone who wanted to play with them do whatever they wanted. After all, the VAXen were so much cheaper to buy and operate than the CDC and Cyber machines, that they considered it "free" computing.

My dear friend from ISP days, the late Steve Houdek, adored the VAX and the VMS operating system. He learned all he could at VCC's two pet VAXes and then later worked for a VAX data center.

VMS eventually became OpenVMS. There was once a move to port VMS to the PC architecture, but PC-VMS never even made it to beta level, as far as I ever heard. I would've built a PC-based research computer and run VMS on it, if I could have.

I'm sure I have friends from all those eras who get chills and break out in hives thinking about having to work with VMS, much as when I contemplate working with IBM MVS or IBM VSE with JCL. (shudder) But I found the VAX/VMS combination to be very dependable and a good system to really cut my teeth on serious computing. A few years later, when we started using the Berkeley version of UNIX, I had a much better idea of what I was doing.

It's been years since I had to actually log into a VMS system at WMU -- when I was logging into piglet or kanga, I was using DEC VT-100 or VT-240 terminal emulation in MS-Kermit to do command line processing.

But you know? The VMS-Mail system worked pretty damned well for its day. And I had a lot easier time of managing thousands of old emails that way than the current stupid system. Really.

Enjoy your retirement, OpenVMS. At least for the five or six machine cycles before the power is cut and you're lobotomized forever. (evil grin)

Dr. Phil

Dave and Laura and Cake

We went to Dave & Laura's wedding on Saturday in Champaign-Urbana IL. And yes, Rodney was there.

Dave and I shared an office through our MS and Ph.D. days at Michigan Tech. The Rodney Reindeers had come out from Hallmark the year before, so I introduced them to the Physics grad students. (grin) This particular Rodney was my second Rodney, but my first Office Rodney, affectionately nicknamed the Laboratory Retriever. Dave and I spread the cult of Rodney for years.


Rodney reading the program. (Click on photo for larger.)


The Dramatis Personae. (Click on photo for larger.)


The lovely ceremony outside The Lake House in the park. (Click on photo for larger.)


We formally meet Laura in the receiving line. Brother Pete at left. (Click on photo for larger.)


Dave's brother Pete shaking hands with Rodney in the receiving line - I think I last saw Pete about the time of his Mechanical Engineering MS defense at Michigan Tech. (Click on photo for larger.)


Dave and Laura greeting more family. (Click on photo for larger.)


The 600ml table centerpieces -- with sea shells. (Click on photo for larger.)


The wedding cake had vanilla or chocolate cake, but the German chocolate cupcakes were made by Dave, using his late mom's special recipe. (Click on photo for larger.)

We'll be more serious later. (grin) But Congratulations Dave & Laura!

Dr. Phil

EDITED 6-25-2012 Mon -- Ack! Auto-complete in the LJ Tags field put in the "frauds" tag, not the "friends" tag! In my defense, I'm working on a tiny 5" screen.

First Stanza

Between Northwestern undergrad and Michigan Tech grad school, I worked for 2½ years in the Pre-Order Search Section between Order and the Cataloging Dept. at the Northwestern University Library. All three units were in Technical Services and all three were somewhat obsessed with accuracy. All of us had occasion to input data records and we worked hard at not making mistakes. One day someone was at one of the big IBM mainframe terminals and said, "Oops." A person at the next terminal said, "No 'Oops' at the terminal."

Refrain

Oops, I Did It Again,
(Oh No You Didn't)

Second Stanza

In grad school, I was sitting in the office debugging a FORTRAN program on Monday 19 October 1987 when one of the other grad students came in and said the stock market was crashing. At the time it was down nearly 300 points. It went on to drop over 500. I remember thinking that it was my generation's Great Depression being born and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it. I mean, I was in the middle of graduate school, busy working on my doctorate. I'd defended my MS thesis, but hadn't gotten around to finishing the revisions, so officially I didn't have any graduate degree. If the economy collapsed and the university started laying people off -- there really wasn't any place to go. It would be two years or so before I could take wing and try to go somewhere, assuming there was an economy left at the end of the day. So I shrugged and went back to debugging my program.

Turns out my reaction was common. Unlike 1929, there wasn't the same kind of people dabbling in the stock market in 1987. If the stock market was crashing, most people didn't care. Indeed, the U.S. economy didn't tank and within a year things were back to normal. Or at least normal for 1988.

Refrain

I don't care,
(I swear)
I don't care,
At all.

Third Stanza

Thursday the New York Stock Exchange took a nosedive. For a brief amount of time the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down nearly a 1000 points, but that big drop only lasted like 90 seconds. Rumor has it that someone typed a sell order for 16 billion, instead of 16 million -- Citi denies this, but who asked them, hmm? Then automatic sell programs triggered on the big sell order and for a brief moment some stocks hit zero. Some want to blame the initial drop on concern about the Greek Debt. Some figure that some sort of correction was overdue.

The thing that killed me about Thursday was how much this was Not News. Yeah, I heard a bit in passing on NPR's All Things Considered, but if this was The End Of The U.S. Economy, you sure couldn't tell by the news. Indeed, the local TV news was dominated by coverage of the death of legendary Detroit Tiger's announcer Ernie Harwell. Thursday night NBC's Brian Williams was on The Late Show with David Letterman. I was not really paying attention, but they spent most of the time talking about last Saturday's incompetent Times Square car bomber and the unfolding ecological disaster off the coast of Louisiana. But a major stock dive? Just a few minutes right at the end. I expect tomorrow's Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me to be all over the (b)illion versus (m)illion issue, if it makes the show taping in time.

But the stock market wasn't much for news. Americans are weary of the economy -- and if some Wall Street fat cats got skinned on Thursday, then no doubt the sentiment is "good for them." Because the rest of all already had our retirement investments fleeced in 2008. What can they possibly take from us in 2010?

Meanwhile, neither Big Oil or Wall Street seems to get it, regarding why they need to be regulated for the good of everyone.

Refrain

And I'm free, I'm free fallin',
Everything is less than zero...

Chorus

Thank God for those financial institutions,
Too big to fail and,
Paying millions in big bonuses,
So they have the best and brightest,
Forever on the payroll.

Oops, I did it again.
(Oh no you didn't.)

Dr. Phil