October 2007

[29-Oct-2007]
Umm, what?:   Does Martin Fink, head of the Business Critical Systems Group at HP think that RMS is a third party product? (307 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[28-Oct-2007]
Great article from internetnews.com:   internetnews.com has published a great article in reference to the 30th anniversary of OpenVMS's release. It's certainly worth a read. (20 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[25-Oct-2007]
Happy 30th, VMS!:   25th October 1977 was the day that VAX VMS made its debut. 30 years later, it's still going strong and being actively developed. Click on the 30th Anniversary image over in the menu bar to visit the HP site celebrating the event! (42 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[16-Oct-2007]
Debugging tricks, part 2:   In Part 1, we saw that the OpenVMS debugger could be invoked dynamically via a call to lib$signal. This is rather cool, but even better is that you can pass commands directly to the debugger. If you have ever had an end user call you up to report an error, and after you've asked them to read you the message and traceback they say Oh, I don't have it on the screen any more, then this trick is for you. (260 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[15-Oct-2007]
Debugging tricks, part 1:   Back in the days of VMS on VAX, a standard trick for software developers was to use the PATCH command to turn off the debug bit in an image file that had been compiled and linked with the /DEBUG qualifier. In this way, the image could be deployed into production with full debugging symbol tables available, allowing the developers to flip one bit to obtain full debug support if required for troubleshooting. A more elegant way to achieve the same functionality today is to directly invoke the debugger from your image. (305 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)