[Info-vax] OT: For Mr VAXman: Microsoft racist gaffe !

[John Wallace]

On Sep 1, 2:00 am, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber... at comcast.net>
wrote:
> Michael Kraemer wrote:
> > Keith Parris schrieb:
>
> >> Hardware cost is the same -- any old PC. Emulation software is free:
> >> Personal Alpha fromhttp://personalalpha.com/or simh from
> >>http://simh.trailing-edge.com/. Licenses are free from
> >>http://openvmshobbyist.org/. The only cost at present is $30 for a
> >> OpenVMS Hobbyist media CD.
>
> > and what kind of apps should they run
> > on this "personal alpha"?
> > Which office suite does HP recommend?
> > Or maybe some web browser?
> > Oh, I forgot, web browsers are forbidden
> > on a server-only OS.
> > But running an OS just for itself is kind of boring,
> > isn't it?
>
> Seems to me that there used to be a couple of word processors for VMS.
> One was Word Perfect and the other was DECWrite.  I think there was even
> a spreadsheet: Lotus 1-2-3.
>
> If DEC had ever completed "rectal extraction". . . .  <sigh!>

I don't know about 1-2-3 for VMS, but there was Access Technologies'
2020 for VMS, and in particular 2020 Realtime (on character cell or
DECwindows) which was a really quite remarkable product when connected
to a suitable external data source, which wasn't a big exercise. Just
what today's financial markets need for their latest trend, high
frequency trading (then again maybe the markets aren't what we need,
but that's another story). See e.g. http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/1375
for a link to a "high frequency trading" platform outfit - fyi, the
underlying platform there is (not surprisingly) Linux. Windows doesn't
do "low latency".