[Info-vax] Steel Industry WAS Re: VMS - what is the current thinking amongst the user community

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Mar 29, 5:15 pm, "Tom Linden" <t... at kednos.company> wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Mar 2009 15:54:46 -0700, dsnyder <DanielDSny... at gmail.com>  
> wrote:
>
> > I work in the steel industry, VMS is still fairly strong yet.
>
> We had one customer convert from VAX to Alpha 4 years ago so I expect
> they will be around a bit longer, but I had heard the Mittal might abandon
> VMS.
>
> --
> PL/I for OpenVMSwww.kednos.com

I'd be fascinated to hear what's going to replace VMS there. My
experience of working with folk in the steel, and paper, and various
other industries over many years is somewhat dated now but back then
there used to be nothing that came close to VMS in terms of putting a
"real computer with real applications and a real OS" in the real time
process control loop (and making it high availability 24x7) in *any*
industry. I've been working with a couple of soft realtime Linuxes
over the last few months in a high speed data logging application and
whilst in comparison with Windows or with classical Linux it does
well, in comparison with VMS it leaves a lot to be desired technically
(and not just in terms of deterministic real time response). And
whilst the VxWorks and the QNXes and even the Labviews of this world
all have their place, I'd be surprised to see them reliably do the
kind of thing people used to routinely do with VMS in these industries.