On 2020-06-09 11:46 a.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
Googling for VAX VMS DCL gets you a number of references to DEC Command Language.
Don't bother to look at them: it's dead and gone.
Is not! You take that back ... ;-) OpenVMS 9 for x86_64 was released recently. You're unlikely to see it unless you're in very niche banking and healthcare applications, though. But the Win2k kernel owes more than a little to VMS, and some of the low-level Windows tools bear a striking resemblance to VMS command line tools. As a hobbyist, you can't currently get an OS for your legacy VAX hardware (or emulation on Raspberry Pi), as the licensing scheme has recently fallen over. It should be back up soon, though. My brother was doing some consulting in the last decade for a well-known prestige British car maker. They had some really ancient equipment. My brother was auditing their systems, and they had a very important body-panel press controller that no-one could find. They eventually traced the wiring from the control terminal to a junk-filled room. Under the junk was a smallish VAX that had been running undisturbed since the 1980s. I still miss VMS's file versioning; edit FILE.TXT;1 and you'd get a new file FILE.TXT;2 appear as well. Opening FILE.TXT would always open the most recent version. So very simple and solid. cheers, Stewart