Miami Computing & Information Services (MCIS) is pleased to announce that on Tuesday, August 22, 1995, MCIS Technical Support will be adding a new Alpha system to the MiaVX1 OpenVMS cluster in Oxford. While most operations will be unchanged, there are a few changes and new features that users should be aware of. These changes include: 1) OpenVMS 6.2 The new Alpha system will be running OpenVMS 6.2 (the current system is running OpenVMS 6.1). The new user features of this OS are: a) Command Path - currently, when a user issues a command, the system searches all symbols on the system and then searches for a command by that name. If both of these fail, an error is returned to the user. Under OpenVMS 6.2, the system will also search the directories pointed to by the logical DCL$PATH for a .COM or .EXE file with the same name as the command. If it finds one, it will run it. Currently, the DCL$PATH logical points to your login directory and to your current directory. This should make it much easier to run programs that users write and to specify parameters to those programs. b) OLDMAIL - the OLDMAIL command no longer requires the use of in%"" when sending Internet or BITNET style addresses. Use of the in%"" should continue to work, though. c) new /BEFORE and /SINCE options - many OpenVMS commands have a /BEFORE or /SINCE qualifier. These commands can now take advantage of 2 new options - BOOT and LOGIN. The BOOT option will select all files before or since the last system boot. The LOGIN option will select all files before or since the last login of this account. For example, DIR/SINCE=LOGIN will list all files created in this login session. d) /KEY qualifier for SEARCH command - the /KEY qualifier can be used to search for text within a file in certain columns. For more information issue the HELP SEARCH/KEY command at the $ prompt on the new system. 2) ACQUIRE Acquire now accepts it's disk space size in MB rather than blocks. For example, ACQUIRE 5 will acquire 5MB of temporary space. Specifying disk space in blocks will continue to work for backward compatibility but will print an message reminding you to begin using MB rather than blocks. This support will be removed in the future. 3) SAS SAS will now acquire temporary scratch space before running. This should help users with limited disk space who need to execute SAS. 4) Programming Languages New versions of several programming languages are included on the new system. The significant changes to these are listed below: C - support for 64 bit integer constants; compiler and run-time performance improvements. For more information, see the file SYS$HELP:CC050.RELEASE_NOTES on the new system. C++ - XPG4 support; compiler and run-time performance improvements. For more information, see the file SYS$HELP:CXX050.RELEASE_NOTES on the new system. Fortran - signed parameters in DATA statements; automatic arrays (where arrays local to routines are dimensioned by variables that are arguments to the routine); new SELECT CASE construct; new CYCLE statment (interrupts the current execution cycle of the innermost or named DO construct); performance improvements. For more information, see the file SYS$HELP:DEC_FORT063.RELEASE_NOTES on the new system. COBOL - compiler performance improvements. For more information, see the file SYS$HELP:COBOL022.RELEASE_NOTES on the new system. Pascal - performance improvements; other minor improvements. For more information, see the file SYS$HELP:PASCAL053.RELEASE_NOTES on the new system. BASIC - see the file SYS$HELP:BASIC011.RELEASE_NOTES on the new system. ADA - see the file SYS$HELP:ADA032.RELEASE_NOTES on the new system. 5) GCG GCG has been upgraded to Version 8.0. This version fixes a problem with data added to the database after August of 1994. If you wish to try the new system before Tuesday, log onto the current MiaVX1 system and issue the command SET HOST SEA at the $ prompt. If you have any questions concerning these changes, please contact the MCIS Help Desk by electronic mail at [log in to unmask] or by telephone at 529-7900. [Kent Covert, MCIS Technical Support] -- John B Harlan Campus Wide Information Systems (CWIS) Coordinator Miami University 137 Hoyt Hall Oxford, Ohio 45056-1618 USA http://WWW.MUOhio.Edu/~HarlanJB/ (513) 529-5330 (513) 529-1496 fax [log in to unmask]