[Info-vax] OpenVMS at Intel

[Ken Fairfield]

On Aug 3, 11:48 am, John Wallace <johnwalla... at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> On Aug 3, 6:50 pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
[...]
> Those questions are important to Intel, but not directly important to
> VMS.
>
> What is important to VMS in Intel (and other) fabs is the one-time
> industry-default fab-management app, Workstream. Now it's a long time
> since I followed this subject at all closely, but afaik there was a
> "modern" successor to Workstream from the same people (who afaik now
> call themselves Applied Materials). The successor was called FAB300
> because it was intended to be the "go to" product for folks building
> 300mm-wafer fabs. (300mmm fabs go back to the early 2000s). Afaik
> FAB300 wasn't VMS-based, which is likely to be a bit of a shame for
> various reasons; primarily because when you're spending the money a
> leading-edge fab costs, running it on a "cheap" computer system to
> save a few hundred thousand dollars here and there seems like false
> economy. But if that's the way the business managers want to play it,
> and a lot of them do these days...

FAB300 is all Windows based (except that Oracle on Windows/64
failed miserably so they went to HP-UX/Oracle for the database
on IA64).  Workstream was based on VAX DBMS, which was great
for process control, but not your "modern" idea of a database,
relational or otherwise...

In any case, when I left INTC around 4 years ago, the last 200mm
fabs were being shutdown, and all the 300mm fabs were on, or
converting to, FAB300.

The ad posted above is for Intel's ATM sites: Assembly & Test.
ATM has *not* converted to FAB300 for a number of reasons.
So you will find "residual" VMS systems at these sites, which
are largely located in 3rd world countries (although I wouldn't
mind living in Costa Rica for a while :-) .

    -Ken