So, what’s in a name change?

When VMS first came out in 1978 it was officially called VAX/VMS, this was to couple the OS with DEC’s latest range of servers the VAX family. Over the years’ other versions of the OS appeared, including MicroVMS and DesktopVMS, and apparently there was even a Russian reverse engineered version (that’s another story entirely). In the late 80s DEC started to officially refer to the OS as plain old VMS, the thinking being that by now VMS had established itself as its own entity plus they were working on a new family of servers (Alpha).

Roll forward to 1992, times were changing, Microsoft and Intel were starting to make massive waves in commercial IT previously dominated by the likes of DEC and IBM. Oracle and other software companies were also making headlines plus Unix was making huge strides as the OS of choice.

In an effort to appear relevant, VMS Marketing (remember them) pushed to make VMS sound more like an open technology (i.e. Unix like) and this was achieved by making the OS Posix compliant and changing the name to OpenVMS. Problem was VMS was never fully Posix compliant and the name change just seemed to annoy people. Customers and even their own engineers still referred to the OS as VMS even though this was officially seriously frowned upon. In retrospect did the name change work? What do you think?