[Info-vax] VMS port to x86

[Neil Rieck]

On May 24, 2:59 am, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> Neil Rieck wrote:
> > If I were HP, I'd have the skunk-works in India working on an x86 port
> > right now.
>
> Thyey tried this a few years ago but those skunkworks which also
> involved HP-UX were killed because moving HP=UX to x86 would be too much
> of an effort.
>
> With regards to running VMS in emulation. VAX-VMS is over 10 years old
> at 7.3. Not developped anymore. And Alpha/IA64 is barely being
> maintained/developped anymore. About the only commitment from HP is to
> make it run on the upcoming Poulson and Kittson platforms.
>
> So even if you can continue to run VMS on emulated environments, you are
> still limited to whatever VMS version and software are available.

Agreed. But all this was sold to an unsuspecting customer (my
employer) with the claim "buy this x86 platform and emulator then you
won't need to risk upgrading to a higher VMS version" (the department
owning these systems is still paying annual prior version support!!!)

The real joke here is this:
1) we are in possession of all the source code
2) there is VMS/OpenVMS talent elsewhere in the company
3) there are real Alpha and Itanium systems elsewhere running
OpenVMS-8.x

NSR