[Info-vax] Happy new Year !

[JF Mezei]

Richard Maher wrote:

> How inconsolable some must be that VMS is still here in 2010, or are they
> all in denial that those of us here with long memories have had to endure
> their apocalyptic perditions for over 10 years now?

The gartneresque predictions have been going on for more than 15 years now.

There is one metric left to be measured: when 8.4 is released, it
remains to be seen how much marketing the indian team will be allowed to
make about the new release of VMS.

If HP is interested in showing continued commitment to VMS, it would
want to trumpet 8.4 as loudly as possible to show that its new team in
India has a mandate to do more than just maintain VMS.

You know a company is dead when the IP ports reserved to it start to get
re-used. Port 625, named "dec dlm" is now used by the Apple Server
Manager application...  (makes you wonder if the IP cluster on VMS will
use port 625).


> Ah, who cares? I'm off to the Linux server team to hear how they can't
> simply upgrade one layed product without upgrading to a new distro

There are a lot of areas where VMS was clearly superior. But an
operating system is not much use of it lacks the applications you need
today.

>"VMS *is* the best server platform on the planet!"

This is a subjective statement. If you've relied on VMS for over 20
years, you are comfortable with it, you know whart parts of VMS you can
trust, and what parts you can't trust (such as Imap/POP lack of
intrusion detection).

When you move to a new platform, you need to start from scratch, and it
is a daunting project to recreate as close to an environment as you had
with VMS. Some things map well, for others, you need to do thing
differenbtly, and there are things that just don't exist on other
operating systems. And it is often hard to know if a feature does exist
(but done differently) or doesn't exist at all. (for instanceL intrusion
detection on OS-X),