[Info-vax] Happy new Year !

[Richard B. Gilbert]

Phillip Helbig---undress to reply wrote:
> In article
> <ed132a20-a7a5-4c17-aa51-964b1933afa5 at m3g2000yqf.googlegroups.com>, H
> Vlems <hvlems at freenet.de> writes: 
> 
>> Richard, I'm getting the feeling that our visions of how VMS could
>> survive in the future don't differ that much after all.
>> I am not sure what you mean with VMS inability at being targeted at
>> the desktop, or that it is undesirable.AFAIK
>> there has always been terminal support in VMS and that is suffucient
>> for me.
> 
> I don't get it either.  VMS had/has DECwindows, workstation versions of 
> servers etc.  I just don't get it when someone says that it is not 
> suitable for the desktop.
> 

Well, I have an Alpha sitting underneath my monitor which is shared by a 
PC.  My PC gets a lot more use than my Alpha/VMS systems and my Sun 
Ultra 10/Solaris systems.  I use all three for various things but the PC 
get used the most.  Why?  PC/Windows has the applications: Word Perfect, 
  Lotus 1-2-3.  I don't use a database but I do use commercial Genealogy 
software to research and record 20,000 mostly dead relatives.  Some of 
them are very distant relatives!  There's software to interface with my 
Cell Phone, more software for my old Palm M500 and a much newer 
Handspring Treo 90.  There's Reflection 4 to give me a VT-220 emulation
to talk to my VMS systems.  There's Quicken to keep my checkbook in some 
kind of order and Turbo-Tax to figure out my Federal and State income 
taxes.  There's a Web Browser and a POP-3 mail client.

In some cases I might be able to buy software to do under VMS some of 
the things I now do under windows.  I would expect to have to pay ten to 
two hundred times the price of similar software for my PC and get a 
poorer product!  The size of the market is too damned small for 
economies of scale.

VMS is a great O/S but Digital killed it because they could not or would 
not compete on price!  Compare the prices 1984-2004 with PC/Windows and 
with Sun Microsystems Solaris/SPARC.  Sun may be in trouble but Sun is 
still there while DEC went down the toilet ten or fifteen years ago.