[Info-vax] Dave Cutler, Prism, DEC, Microsoft, etc.

[FredK]

"JF Mezei" <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> wrote in message 
news:00c63e2b$0$6711$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com...
>
> To me, one of the biggest mistake is to not make "VEST" standard AND
> more integrated.

VEST was mismanaged due to lag time.  By the time customers were insterested 
in it, we had already moved on.  The early adopters of Alpha ported.  So for 
a long time nobody really used VEST a lot.  By the time the customers who 
*had* to leave VAX and needed something like VEST - we really had stopped 
investing in it and the company was more interested in the x86 Windows 
emulator for Alpha.

VEST also is not a solution for 3rd party software and libraries.  The basic 
issue is who and how do you support such code.  The 3rd party is going to 
say "uh, we don't support that code on Alpha, reproduce your problem on 
VAX" - that is if the 3rd party even still existed or supported it on VAX.

The niche it fills is legacy code that the customer just simply needs to 
run, and doesn't care how or how fast.  Today they'd probably be better off 
running one of the VAX emulators.