Community? Community?"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong does go wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair."
-- Douglas Adams
Stratus Technologies sells hardware fault-tolerant computer systems. (The firm previously was called "Stratus Computer, Inc."; for a brief time it was a subsidiary of Ascend Communications.)
The redundant-component hardware architecture of the Stratus machines provides transparency in fault tolerance. Several different operating systems and software environments are used with various Stratus products, including VOS, Hewlett Packard HP-UX Unix, FTX SVR4 Unix, and Windows 2000/XP.
Several vendors listed sell terminal-emulation software especially configured for efficient use with VOS. A general list of other vendors of terminal-emulation software is here.
3rd-Party Hardware Sources
Stratus Computer, an operating unit of Stratus Technologies, designs, manufactures, markets, and services a range of continuously available (i.e., "fault tolerant") computer systems and associated applications. Founded in 1980, and based in Maynard, Massachusetts, since May 1999, the company focuses on the critical end of customers' businesses. Other companies that have re-sold Stratus machines under their own brand include IBM (System/88) and Olivetti (CPS/32).
A reporter from InfoWorld interviewed Steve Kiely, the president of Stratus, in August 1999. You can read the conversation here.
Some files on the Stratus FTP site are in ".ppt" format, a Microsoft-proprietary encoding readable only by Powerpoint. You can obtain a free read-only Powerpoint-viewer program from Microsoft.
A subset of the Samba SMB client and server has been ported to VOS by Erik Devriendt. VOS Samba provides Windows-NT-style SMB network file and print services. You can read how to use it here.
If your computer is connected to the Internet, despite the custom in the VOS community, do not use an underscore character in its name, if you want the Domain Name System to keep track of it. We receive this same warning from The DNS Resources Directory and from cisco systems. This rule was established by RFC 1035 back in November 1987.
When you are setting up your TCP/IP network for the first time, carefully consider the IP-address issues raised in RFC-1918. Advice on how to assign addresses in a private network can be found here. You can also consult the Internet Protocol (IP) Assignment Guidelines for End Users.
If you'd like a VOS version of the PKzip data-compression software to be available as a commercial product, go here and request it. However, a related type of compressed data storage can be achieved with other software tools freely available from the anonymous FTP Server.
If you read about all the different software problems that must be solved for the High-Availability Linux Project, you'll gain a greater appreciation for the benefits of the Stratus fault-tolerant hardware architecture.
The Stratus V101 is a Televideo 950. The V102 terminal is a Televideo 955 equipped with the 2-page memory option. A Stratus V103 is a Link MC-5 (operated in TVI 955 mode). However, the new V105 is a different genus: it's a Boundless 4000/160 terminal, with either a PC-type or "ANSI" (DEC-like) keyboard, running in VT320/7-bit mode. (Here is some V105 information.)
These Usenet "news" links work only if your Web browser is configured to know a valid news server, and if the server carries that newsgroup.
Stratus Computer has made announcements about its Y2K policy and Millennium support plans. The Stratus web site (http://www.stratus.com/) is the only official source of such statements.
Year 2001 followup:
If you'd like to be sure what the meaning is of
the date string "01-02-01", then you may wish to review
the issues regarding interpretation of 2-digit
year values in s$cv_to_int_date_time.
Click here to see a successful withdrawal of money, at 2000-01-01_00:05:00, from an Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) in New Zealand controlled by a Stratus computer.
"As practiced by computer science, the study of programming is an unholy mixture of mathematics, literary criticism, and folklore."
-- B. A. Sheil (circa 1981)
Stratus Computers Appear in Techno-Thriller:
"The client used Stratus mainframes, compact powerful machines
that were easily networked...."
-- Tom Clancy, Debt of Honor, page 54.
A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.
-- Leslie Lamport
"We decided years ago that the most important element in this business is information technology, and we have geared everything to that philosophy--recruitment, training and compensation. Fail-safe precision is the key to it all."
-- Frederick W. Smith, Chairman and CEO of FedEx.
Computer science is the first engineering discipline ever in which the complexity of the objects created is limited by the skill of the creator and not limited by the strength of the raw materials. If steel beams were infinitely strong and couldn't ever bend no matter what you did, then skyscrapers could be as complicated as computers.
-- Brian K. Reid, in Communications of the ACM, October 1987
Y2K Questions
Is it true that bicycles will also stop working?
-- Inhabitants of the village of Baani in Burkina Faso
"It's boring!"
-- Dan Danz of Stratus, at 1999-12-31 22:30 EST,
waiting for Y2K-related problems to be reported
by Stratus customers around the world
From 1991 to 2010, the Info-Stratus mailing list was the most widely used forum for technical discussion and professional camaraderie among people who use the computing systems made by Stratus Computer, Inc. and its successor, Stratus Technologies. The systems included the product cousins sold by Ascend Communications, Lucent Technologies, Cemprus LLC, IBM, and NEC.
Through most of its existence, messages from Info-Stratus were transceived via a gateway to and from the Usenet newsgroup comp.sys.stratus (As of A.D. 2010, it is probably necessary to remind readers that "Usenet", formed circa 1981 by Truscott and Bellovin, formed the foundation of what is now mostly thought of as "Google Groups".)
Richard S. Shuford (maintainer of this web page) was the founder of Info-Stratus and, through its end in the spring of 2010, was the principal administrator. However, he received a lot of help and encouragement, from a lot of people, whose names include:
