[Info-vax] Out with Hurd, in with OpenVMS

[JF Mezei]

re: DEC's Compilers being more expensive because they were better.

Sorry, but there is no way that VAX-C's superiority to Microsoft's total
development environment warranted a 10 times cost difference ($6000
versus $600).

DEC priced itself out of academia because of policy changes to academic
programs, and it priced itself out of commercial operations that
developped their own software because they had to pay the full price for
compilers. That left the developpers who were members of the always
changing developper program, and those were abandonning VMS because of
the perceived or real drop in market share.

All that is river under the water now.

While rebooting VMS would still be possible today, it would take a
visionary to push this through.  VMS still has many technologies that
are industry leading (such as clustering). But the rest of the OS has
languished.

Whether it would be better to translant what is still of value to Linux,
or whether it would be better to reboot VMS, I do not know.