Some ICL pensioners will remember the early days of the VME/B operating system, with release numbers such as 5X18 (the first “good” release as far as some remember – others may think otherwise), to 5X32 which introduced such advanced features as whoosh loading (also known as checkpoint/restart), through various System Versions up to SV294 and then to the current OpenVME Versions. All of these ran on proprietary ICL hardware from the P-Series 2970 and 2980’s, through the S-Series range to the Series 39 DM1 and Estriel Level 80 and SX to Trimetra SY, LY. Then the change to Intel based hardware on DY, DL and NOVA, and the system software continuing as OpenVME. All this with a huge amount of ground breaking innovations and developments – think of CAFS advanced search, fibre optic cabling as well as the unique purpose designed chippery that was a fundamental part of our systems.

The story has not stopped there. We have OpenVME Systems running with superNOVA – on industry standard Windows or Linux server platforms. OpenVME Version 7 was released in August 2007 and is running live across the user base of large government installations as well as commercial customers in the UK and worldwide. Most of these systems are running workloads that will be familiar to many pensioners, and it remains true that VME is running systems that provide services that touch the UK population. Although it is now unusual for systems to be installed at new customers, growth in established customer applications has maintained the business. Unlike other operating systems the applications on VME systems can continue to run unchanged through all these upgrades of hardware and system versions – so code that some of todays retired ICL people may have produced in the 1970’s and 1980’s may well still be running in productive use.

The VME development and support teams, now based at the Manchester Campus, continue the history of innovation that has been fundamental to the success of VME. The next version of OpenVME is in production for release next year, which along with the set of HostTalk integration software, and enhancements to the underlying VITAE software exploit all the strengths of VME in a modern environment, still providing all the capabilities that make it an outstanding offering. The mainframe class attributes of reliability, maintainability, availability, security and so on, all combined with the best features inherent on the industry standard platforms mean that VME delivers what our customers want. And marketing has launched a `Legacy Modernisation’ business initiative to grow even more services business.

As for the future? You can be sure, with Fujitsu’s commitment to support VME to 2020, that the development teams will continue to come up with bright ideas to extend and enhance the VME environment and keep those customers’ applications running – and the licence revenues heatlhy –for many years to come.

For more background see the Wikipedia entry for VME.