VMS Mascot

VERNON's History

The VMS Mascot

Vernon, the VMS mascott

History of the Vernon the VMS shark

I created the OpenVMS Shark logo long ago (early '90's) for the original 'OpenVMS Champions' program - a worldwide group of business managers who were drivers and advocates of OpenVMS in their local geographies. The reasoning around the logo was that the shark and OpenVMS shared attributes such as:

They have both been around forever.
They are extremely fast and flexible.
They never stop.
They will take on (eat) anything and continue to operate.
They operate in packs/clusters.
And although they will never be cute they are the most efficient and effective machines in their environments.

The tag line for the group was:

In an ocean full of guppy operating systems, wouldn't you want to be the king of the seas?"

Regards,
John P. Smith
OpenVMS Systems and Servers Group

The shark's name is Vernon because one of the first things we used it on was supposed to have the shark and OpenVMS Version x.x (I think it was 6.2 but could have been 6.0). anyway it came back as OpenVMS Vernon x.x so the shark was thus named Vernon...

I know we killed ASAP the collateral (I think it was shirts and maybe mugs).

Warren Sander
OpenVMS Systems and Servers Group