'Good' versions of VMS

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_mcmanis.com>
Date: Fri Jun 29 17:44:10 2001

So now that OpenVMS 7.3 for VAX is out I'm hoping that the Montagar folks
will do an updated VMS Media disk. If anyone has any contacts with the
group that does that I would really like to help out. I'm pretty sure that
we could build a pretty painless and much better organized disk than the
7.2 disk is.

But that isn't really the point of this message. The point was made on a
previous note about a ConDist set that it had VMS 6.0 which wasn't a "good"
version of VMS because it was fairly buggy. That made me wonder if we could
come to a concensus on what "good" VMS releases were out there?

I happen to like VMS 5.5-2H4 which was, I believe, the last release in the
5.x line and thus pretty darn stable. It runs on pretty much every VAX and
uses the "Modern" license management facility that the Hobbyiest licenses
conform to. There is also a lot of software that runs on "5.5 and above" so
that is good too. Finally its the last release that calls itself VAX VMS
(rather than OpenVMS) which gives it a wonderful classic like feel.

Then there is VMS 6.x, of which I've got images for 6.1 and 6.2 (no 6.0 but
I opted to pass on the ConDist as well). Is there a release after 6.2 that
sits between it and the 7.x release? Given the shortness between 7.0 and
7.1 I'm going to guess that 7.0 had some serious issues and 7.2 which is
running on the VLC cluster seems quite stable. (using a patched UCX).

Thoughts? What was the best V4.x release? V3? Does anyone have VMS 1.x and
if so what processors does it support? As I recall on the 780 at school it
looked a _lot_ like RSX-11M+ :-)

--Chuck
Received on Fri Jun 29 2001 - 17:44:10 BST