Re: Naive DEFSYSTEM replacement

> On Jul 28, 2025, at 5:04 AM, Tim Bradshaw (as tfb at cley dot com) <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> But I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are not still VMS systems out there running Lisp applications in production.

There no doubt are. A story that should maybe have been posted to comp.os.vms were it not for the Eternal September.

In the spring of 2019 (before COVID), I came out of retirement briefly to consult for VSI, Inc. (operating as VMS Systems Incorporated), who at that time were working with HP to port VMS to x86-64, its third official port, ignoring a Mach 2.5 port we prototyped in Nashua. As one of the VAX and Alpha VMS TCSEC Vendor Security Analysts (for life), I did it to see what the state of our TCB was, 26 years after I resigned from Digital. And because a few of my dear friends from VMS Engineering had ended up there after surviving Compaq and HP and I wanted to catch up with them while it was still possible; I was one of the youngest people in VAX/VMS when I was at ZKO3-4 ([email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>).

One of them told me a story.  I’ll preface it by explaining that after DEC, she worked directly for Ken Olsen in Advanced Modular Solutions. She’s also been a DoD contractor since DECwindows FCS, and sometime along the line, DoD had installed a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) at her home in Florida. This is extremely rare.

What she was willing to tell me, as someone who’s never held a clearance, by choice, was that she’d worked on a contract for DoD to locate all remaining DEC hardware: DECsystem-20s, PDPs, VAXen, Alphas, Information Servers, and Itaniums in the vast maze of classified DoD internal networks. And what she reported up was, 'it's way more than one'. Some were DCE OSF/1s, VAXELN (Executive and Language for Networks), and VAX/ft (fault-tolerant VAXen) systems, and others were buried in secure closets in parts of Joint Base Moria, where no one was willing to even shut off the uninterruptible power to see what would break, if anything.

So I assert it’s extremely likely some of these are running DECset, Ada and Lisp, doing exactly what they were designed to do, 24x7x365, in some cases with VAXcluster failover.

Derrell, former VAX/VMS Security Project Leader, TCSEC C2/B1, 1986-1993