[Info-vax] VMS port to x86

[JF Mezei]

Subcommandante XDelta wrote:

> But let us assume, for argument's sake, that Meg Whitman is a
> innocent, a "clean hands", naive about the sheer inherent quality and
> potential of the VMS asset on the HP books 


I believe it is John Egolf's job to ensure HP management know about the
potential of VMS. He and a couple of others are all that is left that
know about VMS' potential.

More importantly, those few very large customer who still rely on VMS
can call Whitman and ask to speak to her about VMS. The president of a
stock exchange has enough clout to get past Whitman's secretary and
admin assistants and get to speak or meet with her.


What Egolf could do is remind Whitman that while the pilot to evaluate
porting HP-UX showed such a project to be too expensive, porting VMS
would not be too expensive.

We know that HP employees are forbidden to discuss porting VMS to x86 to
the public, but Shirley, they can discuss it internally ?

Whitman inherited contracts and decisions that are past the point of no
return on IA64 and the operating systems.

Decimating VMS engineering was done because they knew there wouldn't be
much development left to be done on it. Same with HP-UX.  It would be
hard to reconstitute the experience that was there prior to the decimation.

So it is not an easy job for Whitman to overturn those decisions.
Overturning the "sell the PC division" was easy to do because nothing
had been done yet so there was really nothing to reverse. But in the
case of IA64 and VMS, much has already been done to make it past the
point of no return.

It still is possible to turn it around and save it, but it is getting
more and more difficult.


The best we could hope at this point would be using the VMS clustering
experience to develop "TrueCluster" for Linux which would be sold by HP
only.  (and porting of TPU to Linux and maybe OS-X, both of which
support X window)