[Info-vax] Bliss was Re: Learning VMS application programming

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <lums63$f9g$1 at dont-email.me>,
	John H. Reinhardt <johnhreinhardt at yahoo.com> writes:
> On 2014-09-08 12:16:28 -0400, Bill Gunshannon said:
> 
>> In article <lukibf$bqm$1 at dont-email.me>,
>> 	David Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> writes:
>>> 
>>> It wasn't too long ago that there was a thread on the use of PDP-11s in
>>> Canadian nuclear power stations, and included if I recall correctly,
>>> their intention in continuing doing so for some time into the future.
>>> Not sure if 50 years was mentioned.
>> 
>> It wasn't a Canadian Nuclear Plant.  It was GE who manufactures, sells
>> and maintains Nuclear Power Plants in a lot of places.
>>> 
>>> "The right tool for the job" can be a good path to follow, and the
>>> PDP-11s do some jobs very well.
>> 
>> I would love to see their spare parts facility.  But they would probably
>> get upset at all the drooling I would be doing.
>> 
>> bill
> 
> It might not be what you expect.  I work as a contractor to GE and it 
> wasn't that long ago in our Monday morning conferences about what went 
> wrong the previous weekend there would often be incidents involving PDP 
> systems, but they were all emulated on x86 hardware.  Now, this was for 
> GE Rail so may not apply to the Nuclear division (They had a different 
> conference), but it's possible.

Well, the general feeling in the PDP-11 communities where I tend to
hang out are that they are still doing PDP-11 because the time and
cost to get a different system validated is probably prohibitive if
not totally impossible.  Emulated systems would come under the same
umbrella as a new system.  There are probably not that many existing
systems but the cost of maintaining them is certainly enough to make
it profitable for those doing it.

If you think finding COBOL programmers is hard what do you think the
availability of MACRO-11 programmers is like?  :-)

> 
> FWIW, GE still uses "VAX" (They call them VAXes but actually they're 
> Alphaserver 4100s) systems as frontends for their shop floor systems in 
> several plants.  They run Oracle (8i) clients and Oracle*Forms via shop 
> floor PCs with emulated VT100s.  They also run INGRES databases on them.

Yeah, they called the academic VMS system here a "VAX" until it was 
retired even though it was an Alpha for probably a decade.

bill
 

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>