Conceived at Digital Equipment Corporation in 1975, announced in 1977 and first shipped in 1978, HP OpenVMS is one of the classic enterprise operating systems, with new releases available today. OpenVMS sees wide use in hospitals, banking, and other installations and industries that cannot tolerate downtime, whether due to software or hardware failures, or power outages, fires, floods or storms.

The hardware classically found with OpenVMS includes the well-known VAX and Alpha systems, and systems based on Intel Itanium 2 processors. The three operating system ports associated with these platforms are OpenVMS VAX, OpenVMS Alpha and OpenVMS I64, for VAX, Alpha and Integrity Intel Itanium systems, respectively.

Four production releases of OpenVMS have shipped for Intel Itanium systems, OpenVMS I64 V8.2, V8.2-1, V8.3 and V8.3-1H1, and a number of releases have shipped for Alpha and VAX platforms.

V8.3 is the current OpenVMS Alpha release.

V7.3 is the current OpenVMS VAX release.

HP has discussed various future OpenVMS releases including a future mainline release V8.4. OpenVMS V8.4 is reportedly to start field testing in November, 2009 and release circa 2010H1.

The fastest and final Alpha boxes are the AlphaServer GS1280 platform from 2007 (and the closely-related AlphaServer ES47 and AlphaServer ES80 boxes), a seriously fast symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) computing platform; an Alpha system that provides commercial applications — and for the hobbyist without budgetary constraints — with a seriously and even silly-fast general-purpose computer.

The Integrity rx2660, rx3600 and rx6600 series and various other Itanium boxes are now available from HP, as well as a variety of BladeSystem series boxes; these boxes and OpenVMS itself are generally aimed at a market above commodity computing platforms; at what has been known as the enterprise market.

— Updated 9-Aug-2008 and 26-Sep-2009.