11 Facts About OpenVMS

OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system.

Customers using OpenVMS include banks and financial services, hospitals and healthcare, telecommunications operators, network information services, and industrial manufacturers.

OpenVMS offers high availability through clustering — the ability to distribute the system over multiple physical machines.

OpenVMS operating system has a layered architecture, consisting of a privileged Executive, an intermediately-privileged Command Language Interpreter, and unprivileged utilities and run-time libraries .

OpenVMS allows user mode code with suitable privileges to switch to executive or kernel mode using the $CMEXEC and $CMKRNL system services, respectively.

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The standard CLI for OpenVMS is the DIGITAL Command Language, although other options are available as well.

PATHWORKS was later renamed to Advanced Server for OpenVMS, and was eventually replaced with a VMS port of Samba at the time of the Itanium port.

OpenVMS itself is implemented in a variety of different languages and the common language environment and calling standard supports freely mixing these languages.

OpenVMS provides various security features and mechanisms, including security identifiers, resource identifiers, subsystem identifiers, ACLs, intrusion detection and detailed security auditing and alarms.

POSIX for OpenVMS was later replaced by the open source GNV project, which was first included in OpenVMS media in 2002.

Since then, several companies producing OpenVMS software have made their products available under the same terms, such as Process Software.