[Info-vax] Bradley Manning and OpenVMS

[JF Mezei]

On 13-12-25 11:06, Johnny Billquist wrote:

> fantasies, like a mythical port of VMS to x86,

Oracle documents part of the court propceedings showed that HP did have
covert projects to looking into porting VMS, NSK and HP-UX to 8086.
Employees involved were strictly forbidden to discuss this because this
was done at a time where HP was still trying to convince everyone that
Itanic was not sinking. These projects were abandonned (although for NSK
appears to have been brought back to life).


> magic things done by the 
> old engineering teams that have just been hidden and kept away from the 
> world, 

X-window FMS. And I am sure there is plenty more.

>the total incompetence of the current team, and god knows what else.

When you look at how long it took them to package 8.4, and that in doing
so, they introduced silly errors like the directory command not knowing
the difference between a normal file and one whose "directory" bit was
set, it shows that the team in India were given responsabilities before
they had enough training/experience to handle a mission critical
operating system. That team may have had a couple of experienced guys
one specific products (TCPIP services for instance, and they did the
IP/Clustering), but that does not mean that these guys could
realistically train everyone else on all aspects of VMS.

HP also refused to provide any numbers of the new team versus the old.
If HP couldn't brag about lower costs allowing greater development and
enhanced roadmap, it is because it did not allocate enough budgets for
that to happen.

No matter how smart the new guys are, when you replace an experienced
team with a new inexperienced team with only 2 weeks training, they are
not competent to manage/develop a mission critical operating system. 2
weeks is just barely enough to let someone know how to be a user on VMS,
let alone understand the kernel internals.

A brain surgeon will be considered incompetent when hired to design a
bridge.

>From the pont of view of HP, since they knew VMS was dead end, that 8.4
was almost done and that there would be no new versions, there was no
real need to hire a full engineering team AND give them enough training
to really take over engineering. What HP hired was a maintenance team.
And with a few exception, that was always what the Digital India team
did. They managed the products that were mature. (TPU, ALL-IN_1 and many
other parts of vMS).

> Why can't you just try to stick to things we actually know?

If you wish to believe all is well with VMS, be my guest. It is
Christmas after all, and perhaps you expect Santa to drop a whole new
engineering team with years of experience in VMS and they will magically
start to produce new version of VMS.