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Phone Utility on VAX/VMS

Author: aleks224

Score: 22

Comments: 15

Date: 2021-12-02 12:21:18

Web Link

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cbm-vic-20 wrote at 2021-12-04 21:49:18:

It'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.

yjftsjthsd-h wrote at 2021-12-04 22:36:53:

Oh, no, it's worse than that: We _did_ have it, but nobody cared enough to maintain it -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMosix

krylon wrote at 2021-12-04 22:19:38:

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.

pjmlp wrote at 2021-12-05 09:24:14:

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.

pjmlp wrote at 2021-12-05 09:22:25:

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.

hulitu wrote at 2021-12-05 13:10:07:

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.

pjmlp wrote at 2021-12-05 13:44:14:

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.

aleks224 wrote at 2021-12-02 12:28:33:

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.

phuff wrote at 2021-12-04 21:55:13:

`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.

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote at 2021-12-04 23:23:04:

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.

toast0 wrote at 2021-12-05 00:03:38:

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)

[1]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowWow_(chat_program)

gamache wrote at 2021-12-04 21:34:03:

This was substantially similar to Unix Talk, which may be more familiar to people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)

hestefisk wrote at 2021-12-05 11:43:46:

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. :(

thuccess129 wrote at 2021-12-05 18:58:25:

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?

jandeboevrie wrote at 2021-12-04 21:20:47:

Had an actual chat once via OpenVMS Phone:

https://raymii.org/s/blog/My_first_OpenVMS.html#toc_4

- really fun!