WASD and others

In 1995 came the release of Process Software's Purveyor, a commercial Web server for VMS. Support was dropped in 1999. (It can still be purchased on an "as-is" basis or downloaded and run for free by hobbyists, but source code is not available.) At this writing, the Multinet Web site ^[2] is still running Purveyor, and Compaq's own site ^[3] didn't switch from Purveyor to Apache until September 2001. This book doesn't cover Purveyor because it's unsupported and not under active development; for the same reason I don't cover the port of Netscape FastTrack Server to VMS. (The retirement and end-of-support date for FastTrack is December 31, 2001, on OpenVMS Alpha V7.1-2 and June 30, 2002, for OpenVMS Alpha V7.2-1 and V7.2-2.) Also in 1995, TGV (the company that originated Multinet) produced the Cheetah Web server but dropped it in 1997. VMS was not proving a profitable market for commercial Web server software. It's not entirely clear that a profitable market for Web server software exists anywhere, with the ubiquitous availability of free alternatives. (I would have said "free high-quality alternatives," but that wouldn't have covered IIS.) Figure B-1 illustrates the Web server timeline.

Figure B-1: Web server timeline.

In 1996 Mark Daniel in Australia came out with the first public release of the WASD (initially HFRD) server, which had been working inside the High Frequency Radar Division of the Defense Science and Technology Organization for some 18 months before that. Both OSU and WASD were adopted fairly widely and have grown user communities; both are still under active development.

^[2]multinet.process.com

^[3]www.openvms.compaq.com