[Info-vax] IT shops call on HP and Oracle to kiss and make up

[Michael Moroney]

koehler at eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org (Bob Koehler) writes:

>In article <0dWdne__6Y2mVBDTnZ2dnUVZ_v2dnZ2d at earthlink.com>, "John Reagan" <johnrreagan at earthlink.net> writes:
>> 
>> From TFA:
>> "OpenVMS, in particular, would be a messy operating system to port,
>> Eunice said. “I call it a ‘guts-exposed’ operating system; it doesn’t
>> have much of an abstraction layer to simplify the movement to a new
>> chipset." Plus, OpenVMS has been ported several times already over the
>> course of its 30-plus-year history, he pointed out. It started out
>> life on the VAX, then moved to the DEC Alpha chip, and finally to
>> Itanium. "The prospect of another port is unpalatable,” Eunice said."
>> 
>> 
>> Somewhere I remember a comment about the port to Itainum resulting in
>> less hardware dependence, though not a flat out HAL (hardware
>> abstraction layer).
>> Or is that a hopeful fantasy on my part?
>> 

>   Yeah, the comment is a load of bull.  Did multiple ports somehow
>   make UNIX unportable?  Were they responsible for the late 60's era
>   kernel design, the troublesome security model, or the late 60's era 
>   user interface?

It is a load of bull.  I worked for OpenVMS Engineering and my Alpha 
drivers needed hardly anything to get them running on Itanic.

VAX->Alpha was another story.  Someone in VMS Engineering had a homemade
cartoon outside their cube, a guy building a space shuttle.  Caption: 
"After porting to Alpha I decided to do something simple for a change."