[Info-vax] Itanic is a dead end : IBM

[JF Mezei]

Phillip Helbig---undress to reply wrote:

> However, Fortran 95 is the last standard to be supported on VMS, whether 
> Alpha or Itanium.  So, HP has effectively bowed out of the HPC sector a 
> long time ago.
> 
> Yes, perhaps not everyone needs the new features in the new standards, 
> but one does want support for the latest architecture.  It's probably 
> only a matter of time before even that stops.



Digital started off as a scientific company (come to think of it, so did
HP).

But Under HP, VMS has always been in "business critical" servers
division, not "scientific computing" (if such a division existed). If
its's focus is business, then the need for fortran might not be as well
understood.

Also, if the IA64 architecture is stable with just teeaks in
implementations, perhaps continued improvements in compilers would be
pointles sbecause they would not yield performance improvements over a
previous version of compiler.


At the end of the day, the VMS ecosystem is not keeping up with industry
and has fallen behind.  Still good for your legacy applications and I am
sure HP will take your support dollars, even for VAX and VAX-VMS for
many years to come.  But nobody should expect anything significant in
terms of improvements to VMS or its ecosystem unless there is a big
change of philosophy at HP and perhapds large investment to port HPUX,
NSK and VMS to the 8086 and bring those products back to life.

Lets not kid ourselves, Oracle's decision will be rather devastating for
HPUX, and a drop in sales may be just what HP needs to justify putting
IA64 out of its misery.

One reason why Gartner's declarations that VMS going to die didn't have
much impact is that everyone (outside of the core loyal group)  agreed
that VMS was already dead, so the declarations didn't have much impact
and VMS was able to survive under the radar especially since Digital was
also dying in the 1990s and dead in this century.

But for IA64, it is different. It isn't under the radar, so when Oracle
and/or IBM make such statements, it does hit a raw nerve because
everyone suspects IA64 is about to die and everyone is just waiting for
signs that the axe will fall. And the Oracle and IBM statements may just
be those signs.