[Info-vax] OpenVMS.Org quick pool

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2012-08-20 21:36:07 +0000, David Froble said:

> Bob Koehler wrote:
>> In article <k0otgd$tju$1 at dont-email.me>, David Froble 
>> <davef at tsoft-inc.com> writes:
>> 
>>> A good question is, "is an emulated Alpha surperior to an emulated 
>>> VAX?", all else being equal?  I'd be interested to know.
>> 
>> Only in that DEC made the stupid decision to split the source pool
>> when they went from VAX to Alpha, so many features were never ported
>> back to VAXen, and there are some that require 64 bit.

There was vastly more involved with that source-pool pool-split, and 
several of us did a large pile of work resynchronizing the tools and 
related after the dust finally settled.    But the pool-split happened.

And why would there be a whole pile of effort expended back-porting 
stuff to VAX?  That architecture was deemed to be on the way out, just 
as soon as the Alpha systems were released.  Whether a task is 
technically feasible collides - once again - with business 
considerations and the financial feasibility of the task.

> Seems like nobody wants to answer the question that was asked ....

Is chocolate pie superior to apple pie?

Without some idea of the requirements, there's no answer to that question.

Alpha is arguably a simpler architecture than VAX.  VAX doesn't use 
IEEE floating point, which means the emulator has to deal with that 
bit-shuffling.  But then various Alpha applications were built with VAX 
floating point.  Most any target platform is 64-bit these days, so 
that's not much of a difference.  simh is available and BSD-licended 
and free.  The Alpha system emulators aren't.  Some applications are 
written for VAX.  Some are written for Alpha.  But all things probably 
aren't equal.  Apple pie?  Or Chocolate Pie?  What's your preference?  
Or would you prefer a port and a native implementation of your pie?


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