VMS

From Waisman Brain Imaging Wiki

VMS is a computer operating system, like Windows or UNIX. It is very old, and isn't very popular nowadays. It was produced by the Digital Equipment Corporation, which is now a part of HP (http://www.hp.com/). HP now calls it OpenVMS, and plans to continue support for it until at least 2011.

We used to use VMS for most of our computing at Brogden. We stored studies collected with the HEM/SCS system on it, and ran our data processing and analysis on it, mostly in SAS.

VMS stores files in a proprietary format that can make them quite difficult to transfer to another system. As a result, we've had to create some utilities that help with this transfer so that we can move our old experimental data onto our UNIX servers. Most of the old studies have been transferred, but some are still on VMS optical disks and backup tapes.

If you hear old hands talking about "the Alpha" (aka "PSYPHX") or "the VAX" (aka "PSYPHY"), they're referring to our old VMS systems. Both of these have been shut off for years, but they're still stored in a closet, just in case we ever need to turn them back on for some reason. As that likelihood has become vanishingly small, we're planning to send them to SWAP at the beginning of 2007.