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

[Arne Vajhøj]

Michael Kraemer wrote:
> JF Mezei schrieb:
>> They are not concerned about performance. If you have plant machinery
>> designed to produce 1 tonne of paper per hour, you can't just push a
>> button to make those machines go faster, so in the end you don't need a
>> faster computer to control those machines. So having your VAX box moved
>> to an emulated 8086 gives you compatibility with your older system
>> without any software worries and with mor readily available spare parts.
> 
> Which is kind of a strange argument.
> The main issue here is reliability, not speed.
> Those emulators most probably run on top
> of some Linux or (gulp) Windoze OS.
> Now we are told here over and over again
> how crap these platforms are,
> crashing all the time and needing xx patches
> per month etc etc.
> How can such unreliable platforms host VAX/VMS ?
> They would need to be at least as reliable as VAX/VMS
> to be worth hosting it.
> And if they are just as reliable, why not just skip VMS
> and proceed with Linux/Windoze instead ?

Your argument is correct if the stability of the OS is
not affected by how much stuff is running on it.

It could be argued that a stripped down host OS (and Linux
could be stripped down a lot) only running the VAX emulator
would be a lot more stable than the same OS running the same
apps as the VMS system.

But if we look out in the real world, then people are
switching from VMS and various commercial Unix'es to Linux
and Windows.

Arne