[Info-vax] OT: IBM Offering $9-10 Per Share for Sun

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Apr 6, 5:01 am, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber... at comcast.net>
wrote:
> JF Mezei wrote:
> > Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>
> >> I can not see why the VMS engineers would do that.
>
> > Because they love their work ?
>
> > Why did some engineers design the DS10L out of a midnight hack ? Once it
> > was done, Compaq liked it and sold tousands of them in high profile uses
> > (genome project).
>
> > Also, consider the highly theoretical/speculative scenario when VMS
> > engineers learned that VMS was to be canned with IA64 and that the date
> > was coming soon. Consider that high end folks at HP were heard saying a
> > VMS port to 8086 was not possible or too expensive (excuse).
>
> Did you ever consider that, just maybe, it's NOT feasible to port VMS to
> an 80x86 architecture?  Recall that VMS and the VAX architecture were
> designed together and that decisions were made regarding what would be
> done in software and what would be done in hardware!
>
> I'm sure that the Alpha architecture was designed with the intention of
> supporting both VMS and Unix.  The 80X86 architecture was designed for a
> micro-computer/personal-computer that would run PC-DOS/MS-DOS.  The
> 80x86 architecture has been a howling success and just about everyone
> has used one at one time or another.  It will not run VMS as we know it!
>
> I'm aware that there's a VAX emulator program for the 80x86
> architecture.  As far as I'm concerned it's a toy, a curiosity.  I doubt
> that it can compete, in the performance arena with Alpha or IA64 hardware.

Fortunately these days in this picture we're not stuck with classic
x86 architecture. We're talking about its next generation successor,
the AMD64 architecture, which just happens to have succeeded in being
remarkably compatible (transparently so, in the vast majority of
cases) with classic x86 when it needs to be, whilst also behaving like
a real 64bit architecture when *that* is what's needed.

As for x86 systems hardware: it's already been pointed out that the
innards of any reasonably modern low-end Alpha (from any AlphaStation
onward) were remarkably PC-like in terms of chips and functionalities,
and the same could presumably be said to some extent for Itanium,
especially if Quickpath for Itanium ever actually comes out (even
though it's no longer going to be socket-compatible, it presumably
needs to be architecturally compatible, unless silly subsetting games
and the like come into the picture).