[Info-vax] Moving away from OpenVMS

[Bob Koehler]

In article <5ktv89-3ef.ln1 at news.sture.ch>, Paul Sture <paul at sture.ch> writes:
> 
> "it was revealed some years ago (at a DECUS symposium I believe) that
> VMS engineering had arranged to code at least one utility that was part 
> of VMS in every language available for the system. This was intended to
> guarantee that the runtimes for every language would have to be included 
> with VMS.

   That is an old tale that has repeatedly been shot down by folks from
   VMS engineering.  They have cited languages which VMS supports but
   no VMS code is written in.

> 
> You may remember that many years back, some vendors were charging 
> separately for language runtimes, so you could write programs in a 
> language, but to distribute them usefully to others you had to pay toll 
> to the vendors. This was a method which ensured that such a thing could 
> not happen with VMS."

   Such a thing happened with VMS.  When VAX C first shipped, thier 
   was no C RTL in VMS and the only way to get it was to buy the compiler. 
   Soon DEC gave C developers permission to ship the RTL with thier
   product.

   When DEC C++ first shipped, thier was no C++ RTL in VMS and the only
   way to get it was to buy the compiler.  Soon VMS 6.0 shipped with the
   C++ RTL included.

   We were early adopters of VMS 6.0 as we needed the C++ RTL for code
   developed under VMS 5.5 and did not want to buy the compiler for 5.5.