[Info-vax] Current VMS Usage Survey

["Gérard Calliet (pia-sofer)"]

Le 05/12/2013 10:26, Michael Kraemer a écrit :
> JF Mezei schrieb:
>
>> "lined up" is a bit too strong. They had been coerced into trialing IA64
>> in exchange for keeping good prices on x86 chips.
>
> That's wild speculation.
> Moreover, *all* major manufacturers had lined up,
> and if all of them get discounts, what sense
> does this make?
>
>> Had HP told Intel to give up before/at Merced, nobody would have
>> complained about IA64 not making it to market.
>
> Indeed the right time to give up without loosing face too much
> would have been 1997 to 1999. More than three years of development
> without first silicon being significantly faster than the
> then current RISC chips didn't bode well.
> But probably there was still some hope at HP/intel.
>
>
>> IA64 made sense in the 1990s when HP needed something to compete against
>> Alpha Power and Sparc.
>
> HP didn't need IA64 to compete performancewise,
> PA-RISC did very well against all those three.
> The true problem was the limited sales number
> vs ever increasing development and manufacturing costs.
> Power and Mips had the embedded segment (and the Mac)
> to grow beyond the magical 1M chips per year,
> PA was on the edge and Alpha was below one order
> of magnitude. Teaming up with intel for a new
> commodity chip was the natural way out.
>
>> But by 2001, this had changed quite a bit,
>> expecially with HP getting Alpha and it woudl have gained a lot of
>> leverage by giving it to Intel.
>
> Totally absurd.
> Back in 2001, Itanic had a bright future, 100% industry support,
> including M$. Alpha had nothing of that kind, M$ support was
> cancelled in 1999 or 2000, iirc.
> Going with Alpha would have been entirely irrational.
> Just as if they had chosen the 68K.
>
It is not the time to do large historical analysis, perhaps, even if it 
is of interest. But, just to say something :

We talk about dead of VMS, and dead of Itanium.

The similiraty between these events is End of Diversity.

Itanium dead for a lot of reasons exposed here, I agree. There is 
another factor : our logic in industry now is : impossible to go out a 
main stream, when it exists.

Itanium was killed also because it is impossible to go out x86, and out 
of the wars around it.

VMS is murdered because the mission critical concept is decadent, and DG 
think about mission critical as it could be "on the cloud".

Everything is a windows xx, running on a x86 yy, all of them in "the 
clouds".

As we destruct every days bio-species, and every month forget a langage, 
we destruct diversity in computer science.

In other words, fighting for VMS is like fighting against End of Forests 
: it is fighting for oxygen.