[Info-vax] OT: news from the trenches (re: Solaris)

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On Thu, 12 Mar 2015 15:47:18 -0400
Stephen Hoffman via Info-vax <info-vax at rbnsn.com> wrote:

> IBM has a very long history of emulating previous generations

n the mainframe nothing has been emulated. Of course they pioneered
virtualization but the whole point of S/360 was one architecture
implemented on machines from large to extra large. You're suggesting
something that is completely infeasible, has never been done once in over
50 years of production and you're suggesting it's a foregone conclusion.
That is just unsupportable and wrong.

> > The OS is too big and too complicated and most of all too closely 
> > coupled to the hardware (which is why it works so well) to ever be 
> > ported.
> 
> VAX/VMS won't ever be ported, either.  VMS is far too tied to the VAX, 
> after all.

But VMS was ported off the VAX, twice. MVS hasn't been ported off the
mainframe, ever.

> >>> If you think about it I'm not sure porting VMS to Intel is not going
> >>> to be suicidal. After they see they can run on cheaper hardware,
> >>> isn't cheaper software the next step? And Linux is free and
> >>> eventually some pinhead is not going to approve the budget for that
> >>> wierd OS nobody ever heard of, since Linux is free...
> >> 
> >> Have you ported OpenVMS applications to Unix?
> > 
> > No, I have about a week or so experience with OpenVMS.
> 
> Might want to try porting some code onto or off of OpenVMS, and gain 
> some experience.

I'm not interested in porting. I don't believe in portable code. That is
a separate issue from understanding what people do when they change
platforms.

> > And I'm not talking about porting.
> 
> Effectively, you are.  Folks still have to get the business logic and 
> the data out of the existing environment, even if this isn't about 
> porting the application code.

Sometimes they buy packaged code. Sometimes they hire a service beaureaux.
Sometimes they sell the business and go fishing. And other times they
decide they can't do the migration at all, after 10 years of talking about
it.

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