[Info-vax] "Shanghai Stock Exchange" and OpenVMS

[JF Mezei]

Neil Rieck wrote:
> http://logikalblog.com/2009/01/17/hp-ux-and-ms-windowsfail/

In February 2001, Compaq (Canada), during some sales event, announced
that it had concluded a huge contract with the Government of Québec to
replace a huge lot of  mainframes and minis  with Alpha systems with
Tru64. We all know what happened on June 25 2001.

A major win today doesn't garantee there won't be bad news tomorrow.


Not matter what HP does to VMS, existing shops will continue to use it
for many years to come.  Your dishwasher continues to run even though
the company that made the water intake solenoid valve has stopped making
those. Steel plants will continue to operate even though VAX is no
longer manufactured. and AWACS planes will continue to fly with hardware
that runs VMS for another 15-20 years because that is how long planes
fly for. (and for the USA military, some planes end up flying much longer)

This is one of the advantages of VMS: the hardware is such that
continued support is possible and profitable. For commodity systems, I
am not sure HP will still support PCs made by Compaq in 1986. Yet, some
paper mill running on a microvax II is proably still able to get
hardware support, despite Digital and then Compaq having ceased to exist.

As far as stock exchanges are concerned, Nasdaq owns OMX. Until Nasdaq
ditches its Tandems and goes for VMS, there remains the fear that Nasdaq
will tell OMX to focus on Tandem.

And it isn't clear whether HP really wants to keep developping both VMS
and NSK/Tandem.  They really seem to overlap each other. VMS used to be
much biggeer than Tandem, but I am not sure how they compare today.


I guess that as long as HP claims that VMS is still being developped
(even if there is only 1 person assigned to its development with 1
planned release per decade), then companies like OMX can still claim
that their own software is viable because it is based on a OS that is
still alive (on paper).

A turnkey, highly specialised system, whether OMX or AWACS probably
doesn't require that VMS be equipped with the latest and greatest, and
if it lacks a modern feature, they may end up developping it themselves.

On the other hand, look at Cerner and you wonder about the future of VMS.