VAX Will Be (For Real) Gone

Friday, June 05, 2020

One of the most consistent patterns in business is the failure of leading companies to stay at the top of their industries when technologies or markets change.… The pattern of failure has been especially striking in the computer industry. IBM dominated the mainframe market but missed by years the emergence of minicomputers, which were technologically much simpler than mainframes. Digital Equipment dominated the minicomputer market with innovations like its VAX architecture but missed the personal computer market almost completely.

—Joseph L. Bower and Clayton M. Christensen, “Disruptive technologies: catching the wave,” Harvard Business Review, 1995.

VAX is both a line of computers by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and the architecture of its processors, produced from 1977–2000. They were once common enough that Henry Spencer listed “all the world’s a VAX” as one of the assumptions C programmers should avoid, in his tongue-in-cheek Ten Commandments for C Programmers. When they came from DEC, the systems ran either OpenVMS or the Unix variant Ultrix.

Ultrix’s last release was in 1995. I don’t have any numbers, but in general if something was popular it got talked about, and I’ve seen so little about it that the only reason I know it existed is because there is a Wikipedia article. OpenVMS continued to be developed both for VAX (up to version 7.3 in 2001) as well as VAX’s successor, Alpha. Even after development for OpenVMS on VAX ceased, you could continue to get “Hobbyist” licenses for it (as well as Alpha, and eventually, Itanium) from HP/HPE, to use with some restrictions on your old hardware or in emulation. HPE ended its Hobbyist program earlier this year, and though VMS Software, which bought all the rights for OpenVMS, has started up a new program, the latter does not include VAX.

In the meanwhile, the OpenBSD project ported its OS to VAX in 2000, and continued to make releases for the architecture until 2016, when it was dropped after OpenBSD 5.9.

NetBSD still theoretically has a maintained port for VAX, albeit one they label as Tier II. Even its future is in doubt, since GCC is now looking to drop support, though by “drop” what is apparently meant is to remove a whole bunch of code where the upstream version hasn’t been able to compile itself for a decade, and even the patched NetBSD version hasn’t been able to do so since the gcc 4.8 series (ca. 2013–2015). I have to say that to my mind, the port is effectively dead at this point, even if somebody somewhere is still technically doing work on it.

Maybe it shouldn’t, but it makes me a little sad to see things like the VAX end. Not to suggest that VAX was the crowning achievement of human endeavor, or anything like that; but a lot of people’s time, effort, and ability went into designing these machines. It’s regrettable that all that is essentially vanishing, even though lots of other people are doing all kinds of wonderful things on other architectures in other operating systems.

Sic transit gloria mundi.