[Info-vax] "Shanghai Stock Exchange" and OpenVMS
etmsreec at yahoo.co.uk
etmsreec at yahoo.co.uk
Wed Jan 21 12:51:57 EST 2009
On 18 Jan, 21:58, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> 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.
Geeze. No wonder this isn't comp.os.vms any more...
Tandem's market share and volume is much less than OpenVMS. They have
their niches, VMS has its niches. If you need Tandem then the chances
are that HP already know you and you'll already know about it. It's a
very niche product. By comparison, VMS is mass market.
It's important to remember (and Sue will, I'm sure, be able to echo
this) that some of the bright lights from VMS Engineering have left.
This includes people like Hoff, Guy Peleg and Christian Moser. There
are, however, other very bright people who are the new bright lights
in VMS Engineering. Doesn't mean that they're any less capable just
because they're not the same bright lights.
Steve
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