[Info-vax] Development Tooling (was: Re: Opportunity for VSI?)

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <pv65gm$3um$1 at dont-email.me>, Stephen Hoffman
<seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes: 

> Scientific computing was migrating off of VAX/VMS in the late 1980s and 
> into the 1990s, as the VAX prices and the performance became 
> uncompetitive.

Right.  I was there.

> The Alpha price and performance brought some of that activity back to 
> DEC, though not to OpenVMS Alpha.

Right, because DEC said that unix was the future.  People who moved to 
DEC unix soon moved to Linux, and DEC is no more.

> As part of that shift, DEC shifted the VAX/VMS and later OpenVMS sales 
> and marketing emphasis and the enhancements-related work toward those 
> needed for commercial and business applications, and away from 
> scientific computing.

Right.  But a mistake.  VMS used to be an all-rounder, "desktop to 
datacenter".

> OpenVMS just isn't going to be big again in scientific computing.  Not 
> any time soon...

With x86, performance is just as good as with other operating systems.  
I remember when people who didn't know VMS at all wanted to work on my 
machine because the compilers were better.  Perhaps VSI can revive that 
tradition.