[Info-vax] Kittson question

[Simon Clubley]

On 2014-12-31, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> wrote:
>
> But then, even though you may have a Unibus to PCI adaptor card, you
> would then need to spend money upgrading the emulator itself to support
> such a card.
>
> At which point, you need to wonder wether it costs less to update your
> own application to connect to a modern PCI card on the new industry
> standard system, or pay the company that makes the emulator to support
> that PCI to UNIBUX adaptor so that you can use custom and very expensive
> Unibus cards that have not been manufactured in ages and no replacement
> available.
>
> If the industry has developped modern cards that are PCIe that do what
> your decades old Unibus card does, then it seems you are much better off
> getting a commodity card that plugs into PCIe and then hiring Mr VAXman
> to do the driver.
>

Unless they have some very VMS specific requirement (or lots of VMS
specific code), the more likely answer, once they consider (a) modifying
the software source code to be acceptable and (b) switching to a modern
card is also acceptable, is to move the actual hardware interfacing/control
to a modern box running a dedicated RTOS.

I suspect that in many cases, VMS was chosen because it was the most
viable hardware interfacing/control option available at the time.
However, in the embedded world, time has moved on dramatically since
those days.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world