[Info-vax] Happy new Year !

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 03-01-2010 16:15, JF Mezei wrote:
> Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> There are many reasons why it is as it is. The market changed.
>
> I disagree quite a bit with this. Other operating systems are thriving
> in a changing market, including various forms of Unix. Consider how
> FreeBSD has evolved into OS-X. Consider Linux.  Evolution of old systems
> is very possible.

Possible but easy.

I think it would be more relevant to compare VMS with MPE and OS/400
(I can not get myself ti call it 'i').

> VMS has gone down because it was not given the resources to keep up with
> the Jones'.  False arguments that "customers don't need those features"
> were bandied about as *excuses* for not adding the modern features that
> modern customers need.
>
> Porting Mozilla was a ray of hope, but it was short lived because this
> required too many resources to keep all of the middleware needed for
> Mozilla up to date. (I think Hoff or FredK once listed all of the
> software needed just to compile the beast).
>
> Guess what, if they can do this on Linux, they should be able to do this
> on VMS. If they can do this on OS-X, they could do this on VMS. But you
> need commitment and budgets to get it done.

I don't believe in the "VMS on the desktop" dream.

> My prediction is that VMS will continue to be "developped" until the
> death of IA64 is formally announced sometime in the next 2 years at
> which point both IA64 and VMS will get one more iteration before going
> on 5 year support. However, if death of IA64 is announced before 8.4 is
> out, then 8.4 will be the last version.

They will continue to sell Itanium systems quite some time after an 
Itanium EOL announcement and continue to release new VMS versions
for Itanium.

So a timeline would look more like:

2012 - Itanium EOL announcement
2014 - last new processor model
2016 - last new system model
2020 - last system shipping
2020 - last VMS version released
2025 - end of normal service
2030 - end of expensive service

Arne