[Info-vax] Whither VMS?

[JF Mezei]

Neil Rieck wrote:

> Now "IF" the Asian maintainers of OpenVMS are quietly tasked to do a
> port to x86-64, then we will unanimously declare that HP exec were
> business geniuses.

And I will have to eat many of my words :-( :-( :-(

Seriously though, if HP were contemplating a port of VMS to the 8086,
wouldn't they have kept the main engineering group intact since they
have had plenty of experience (many participated in VAX-alpha and many
more Alpha-IA64) ?

A new group with a much smaller core of experienced people (and one
doesn't know whether that expertise covers all areas of VMS, or just
specific ones) doesn't seem conducive to them starting a large porting
project.

Granted, a porting project does require a lot of grunt work to add
#ifdefs to all modules make a few changes and recompile, but it also
requires a lot of high level expertise to do the core kernel and develop
the boilerplates which the grunts can then apply to all of the simpler
modules.