[Info-vax] OpenVMS books

[VAXman- at SendSpamHere.ORG]

In article <8eaf7b38-b1ee-4f5a-9685-008db56beb24 at googlegroups.com>, seasoned_geek <roland at logikalsolutions.com> writes:
>On Saturday, July 22, 2017 at 4:12:16 PM UTC-5, Arne Vajh=C3=B8j wrote:
>> On 7/22/2017 1:57 PM, seasoned_geek wrote:
>> > If you are coming from a worthless x86 world you really need to
>> > develop a completely different mindset before wading too deeply into
>> > the land of real computers with real operating systems. Applications
>> > in the worthless x86 world are all developed from "Me & My" point of
>> > view. It's mine mine mine mine my own PC and my own software and if
>> > you don't know how to use it screw you! If you say it doesn't work,
>> > too bad!
>>=20
>> In a few years VMS will be part of the x86 world.
>>=20
>> :-)
>>=20
>> Arne
>
>They should be porting to IBM's Quantum and ignoring the obsolete x86 world=
>.. INTEL is laying off people in droves. They won't be around much longer. T=
>he ARM and MMX processors are replacing x86 in most things.
>
>Quantum is the next big thing. Ironically, since IBM is doing it, COBOL wil=
>l be one of the first compilers for it. Even more ironically COBOL is more =
>suited to Quantum than C/C++ or any 3GL which supported native booleans. CO=
>BOL had 88 levels in seemingly limitless quantity. The language was/is alre=
>ady suited for "shades of true" Quantum computing.
>
>Nothing against those working on the port, but, I honestly hope it never ma=
>kes it to x86. They will end up bringing in a bunch of bug ridden OpenSourc=
>e code to make it work and then OpenVMS will be just as shitty an OS as eve=
>rything else on x86. We already went through this when the Itanic port lowe=
>red the quality on Alpha. But the Itanic was a chip so bad HP had to kill o=
>ff the Alpha when it had at least another 10 years of continuous improvemen=
>ts left just to force a market for it.
>
>OpenVMS was banned from Black Hat conferences until it started getting Open=
>Source added to it, then it was welcomed with open arms AND it started gett=
>ing breached.
>
>Those legendary multi-decade uptimes VMS is famous for came in large part b=
>ecause of the hardware. Even if you somehow manage to get real clustering t=
>o work on x86 you will never get worthless commodity hardware to last 5 yea=
>rs in a flat out production environment. Spinning up a new instance in a VM=
> like Hypervisor et-al does nothing for all of the users and transactions w=
>hich died with the board. DECdtm and ACMS could provide guaranteed delivery=
> and guaranteed execution because in those rare instances the grid failed a=
>long with your UPS, the OS re-start cleaned up the journaling automatically=
> and transactions picked up from their last successful point. Today's x86 w=
>orld is all up in arms about the billions of dollars left in shopping carts=
> annually. They seem to think it is a consumer issue but in truth it is a w=
>orthless platform issue. When your blade/rack/whatever $40 CPU in a $5000 p=
>ackage died and a new instance was spun up everything was lost for the old =
>instance. Faced with having to start over, customer went to different site.=
> It's not a customer issue.

Over the years, I've purchased several x86 laptops for Linux.  Back In 2012, I
purchased an HP Envy 17.  It was quite a pricey upper end x86.  It just failed
catastrophically yesterday.  To put that in perspective, my 2002 PowerBook 17
and 2009 MacBook Pro 17 are still functioning.  I don't think it's the x86 at
fault here since the MBP is intel based.  However, the commodity marketspace
of the x86 has made many of the offering based around it cheap -- not just in
price. ;)  The Envy, for example, had a plastic frame part in a stress point
at the hinge.  Not even a month into owning it, a screw stripped out from it.
The touted "beats" audio in it was awful.  The whole thing buzzed like an old
rear deck speaker in a late model car.  However, despite those hardware kinks,
it was one of the better environments I've ever gotten Linux running upon.  I
don't have any real-world experience with x86 servers but I do have clients
that seem to be replacing them all too often while OpenVMS running hardware
just keeps on going like the Energizer Bunny.

Just my $0.02.  Does anybody have any pointers to a low-cost x86 laptop?  17"
preferred.  I may ??? have found another Envy (used) but you never know.
-- 
VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker    VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG

I speak to machines with the voice of humanity.