[Info-vax] Opportunity for VSI?

[David Wade]

On 15/12/2018 02:41, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 12/14/18 2:22 AM, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
>> In article <puurhg$5bi$1 at dont-email.me>, Stephen Hoffman
>> <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes:
>>
>>> What would change here that would encourage universities, schools and
>>> trade schools to adopt OpenVMS?  This given that free educational
>>> licenses have been available for ~twenty years. There does seem more
>>> involved here than offering free software licenses.
>>
>> It needs the owner of VMS to support VMS.  One reason universities
>> dropped VMS is because DEC told them to.  I know; I was there.
>>
> 
> Not really.  DEC/COMPAQ/HP never tried to push Tru64/Ultrix
> or anything else into the VMS space.  People forget that no
> one buys a system because of the OS.  It's the applications
> that sell systems.  And when the applications are better on
> other systems the other systems win.  We moved from in house
> systems to BANNER.  BANNER is the  one who dropped VMS.  The
> University had no choice but to follow.  The move was driven
> totally by the application.  And that is the reality of it.
> What major use applications are still available on VMS?
> SPSS? Minitab? SCT Banner? Intersystems Cache?
> 
> bill
> 

I don't know why Universities dropped VMS but when I worked at the 
Natural Environmental Research Council in the UK we bought VMS because 
of the range of applications. The council had a dual pronged strategy so 
we had both VMS and IBM VM/CMS to give us access to the widest possible 
range of applications.

Computers are useless without applications, and yes the OS was only 
relevant because of the applications it gave access too.

These days I believe that IBM touts "Z" as its now called to 
Universities on the basis of Linux Virtual Machines. Hardware used to 
run Linux is much cheaper than hardware used to run traditional MVS/zOS 
or VM workloads.

I see from postings on the CCTALK list that the few small IBM mainframes 
left are disappearing. There are bits of a 9370 in New Zealand I think 
that's being de-commissioned and replaced by X86.

I guess it would be the ultimate irony if VMS was ported to Z to take 
advantage of the IBM hardware in Universities...

... although given that some cloud providers are offering dedicated 
Raspberry PI servers perhaps a native ARM implementation would fly as well.

Dave
G4UGM