[Info-vax] BASIC compiler in the hobbyist distribution

[seasoned_geek]

On Saturday, May 30, 2015 at 3:54:09 PM UTC-5, JF Mezei wrote:
> 
> The success of the rebirth of VMS depends far more on VSI's business
> practices and how well VSI takes cars of the customers it acquires than
> it does on the 8086. Consider that while IA64 is not the 8086, it is a
> liability because everyone knows it is a dead platform. You don't want
> to invest in it. The 8086 is NOT a dead platform.

Just a cheap and flimsy one.

You will never see a steel or paper mill or any other location where lives hand in the balance adopting x86 at any price.

Moving to x86 alienates the installed base and will ___ALWAYS___ fail to compete with "free".

I personally know of one Fortune 100 (might be down to 500 now) company that is running its cash cow business on under powered departmental servers with OpenVMS on them. Why? They have upper management that thinks like many here that cheap and flimsy is the way to make money (they are losing their arse by the way, hence the drop, they were Fortune 50 when I first started doing work for them might even be Fortune 1000 now). They are trying to run a global order processing business on these underpowered boxes that, last I heard, "idle" at 600% utilization (out of 800) because the software licensing fees, not the cost of the hardware, was far too high, exponentially higher, than what they are paying now. So, now they are once again trying to port off VMS (attempt number 9 that I know of, but could be higher) only they've been at it for so many years everyone who had both the business and technical knowledge is gone.

So, they keep whizing money down the drain on canned packages from big names which are supposed to replace this core system and __always__ fail. Just because someone up top believes flimsy hardware with "free" OS "makes good business sense."

Their customer base, btw, used to incredible service and fast order turn around has been dealing with slow order turn around and lost orders since the entire process began. We aren't talking bout $6 books from Amazon, but $18+K engines and other pricey things.