[Info-vax] BASIC compiler in the hobbyist distribution

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-05-28 23:26:16 +0000, David Froble said:

> seasoned_geek wrote:
>> On Thursday, May 28, 2015 at 1:50:52 PM UTC-5, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>> 
>>> That was my point.  Is Solaris even relevant in today's IT world?
>>> If I were VSI I would not waste time trying to determine how to 
>>> "compete" with Solaris.  And AIX while still doing OK is really a very 
>>> niche product and probably not really a competitor anymore.

Ayup.  I'd expect those AIX folks to head to Linux or to System z, if 
they decided to port off of the current POWER systems.  Some few might 
go to Solaris or BSD or to some other Unix.

>> Actually worth it, more so than chasing the "free" market at this 
>> point. The people in those particular niches, particularly AIX and 
>> AS/400, have real business needs and have been able to justify spending 
>> of significant cash to service those needs.

So you're suggesting that the AIX folks port from a Unix system to 
OpenVMS?   The port starts out as pretty much a rewrite.  Without 
access to the Unix compatibility tools and to the various open source 
tools and libraries you've been objecting to, things get yet more 
difficult.

As for the folks presently on AS/400, that's not at all Unix like and 
definitely not OpenVMS-like, so that's pretty much a rewrite, too — 
OpenVMS doesn't have the concept of objects.   Much easier for those 
folks to continue using or to upgrade to POWER / System i boxes.

In either case, rewrites which are not going to happen in any 
sufficiently large quantities; in quantities large enough or quick 
enough to matter.

>> The "free" market has a habit of not paying anyone. I mean they think 
>> it is ok to have servers which have 4 hour outages each year,

A total of 1% of the Lenovo x86-64 servers from that survey had four 
hours outages or more.

99% of the Lenovo servers did better than that; had less downtime.

That's from what you linked, BTW.

>>  so, how is one going to sell them something which runs 24x7 for 
>> decades without down time?

One Egg One Basket designs have been fading out, thankfully.  
Replicating and clustering are well-established, and work.

>> A much easier sell to tell the AIX and AS/400 crowd, hey, your boxes 
>> were supposed to kill the VAX, it is still here. We have 24x7 up-time 
>> measured in decades with ongoing development and you're looking at End 
>> Of Life for your current platform, here is how you port...

The instructions are going to involve learning a wholly new platform, 
and rewriting some or all of the not-COBOL and not-Fortran code 
involved in the applications, and sorting out more than a few file and 
database differences.  Which may well be a rewrite measured in decades, 
for some folks.

> I'm thinking that VSI knows who their customers are.  Check the map  :-)
> 
> Their best bet is to service their customers.

Ayup.   The existing customers and vendors.   Certainly for the 
foreseeable future.

> A really bad bet would be to go after IBM, again, which is part of how 
> we got to where we are now.

Ayup.  But then I'm also wondering what sort of hardware seasoned_geek 
would be going after these IBM customers with, here.  Probably not with 
Oracle SPARC.  Beyond Kittson, probably not Intel Itanium.  ARM isn't 
fast enough (yet?).  POWER?  That would be going after IBM and IBM 
users on their own home hardware turf.   That'd involve an OpenVMS 
port, and then making a really tough marketing case.


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