It’s been said several times that “the best operating system to use is the one you like, unless that operating system is VMS.” It’s funny, and especially snarky, and it contains at least a glimmer of truth; VMS has been essentially abandoned in the last 15 or so years. In my professional computing life, I’ve only worked in one place that used it: TeleCheck. They did so for very good reasons, of course; when they built their all-proprietary, custom system, VMS and Vax/Alpha hardware provided something not easily found on other platforms: failover via clustering. That VMS’ other great feature, versioning built right into the file system, gave us an easy way to retreat from buggy upgrades was just icing on the cake.

Still, with the rise of cheap, commodity hardware, the place in the world for the Digital Vax and Alpha machines dwindled. The rise of Unix, then NT, and then Linux left VMS alone and behind. Windows servers look like your desktop, and Unixy servers all look more or less the same, but takes a whole different skillset to manage a cluster of Alphas — and it’s a skillset that is in short supply, notwithstanding the oft-cited trusim that the last COBOL programmer will be able to name his price.

I last saw VMS in 1997, which is far later than most folks. I left TeleCheck and joined the boom, and spent my time on Solaris and Aix servers, with the occasional and ill-advised Windows NT box thrown in for variety. (Since then IBM has thrown in its lot with Linux, and Sun is clearly circling the drain, leaving Windows and Linux almost alone in the server market.) I assumed, in the years since then, that VMS had gone the way of all flesh, especially after Microsoft made much noise about its NT-on-Alphas move (hey, it sounded like a good idea at the time; ultimately, I think I only ever saw one Alpha running NT, and it was run by the single least competant big-company IT man I ever saw (no, I won’t tell you the client [HDANCN?])).

All of this is just background, of course, to this story. See, Compaq and Digital merged, and then HP and Compaq merged, and now it comes to this.