[Info-vax] Opportunity for VSI?

[David Wade]

On 24/12/2018 02:43, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 12/23/2018 9:34 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 12/18/2018 12:28 AM, Dave Froble wrote:
>>> On 12/17/2018 2:49 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>>>  So, what happened
>>>> to all of those COBOL, Fortran and Pascal jobs?
>>>
>>> I can tell you what happened to some of the people.
>>>
>>> Upon seeing and hearing all the negative things about VMS, some 
>>> figured the ship was sinking, or would sink, and decided to bail out. 
>>> They moved to WEENDOZE, or Unix, or whatever they thought would last 
>>> for a while.
>>>
>>> It wasn't in many cases that their jobs were actually going away, 
>>> it's that they drank the kool aid and believed the jobs would go 
>>> away, and wanted to move on before things got critical.
>>>
>>> I'm guessing that things didn't get so critical, but, those people 
>>> were gone, and if they'd go, then most surely would not come back. 
>>> So, then you had the "it's hard to find people to work on VMS".
>>>
>>> This is a classic example of self fulfilling prophecy.
>>>
>>> Funny thing is, some most likely would have finished their working 
>>> years on VMS, if they hadn't left.
>>
>> I actually agree with you.
>>
>> Way too many companies jump ship way too soon ending up
>> doing multiple migrations because they picked the wrong
>> technology when they were in a hurry.
>>
>> And if people switched just for job security, then they
>> may very well got disappointed. The new stuff often
>> disappeared faster than the old stuff.
> 
> Legacy vs new stuff:
> 
> https://dilbert.com/strip/2017-02-23
> 
> :-)
> 
> Arne
> 
Folks,

  A few ramblings. Firstly I was only briefly a developer, always a 
Systems Programmer or whatever and whilst I did a little on VMS, around 
4.1/4.2 time most of my early life was Honeywell anad IBM Mainframe. I 
was going to say all of the Honeywell and much of the IBM mainframe work 
did go away, but in fact one of the Honeywell sites was still there, 
running commercial Cobol under emulation until a few years ago.

Certainly almost all the the Small/Medium IBM sites have now gone away 
in the UK. Yes the Banks still have mainframes, as does I believe Air 
Traffic control and some government departments, but the days when every 
100 person business had one have gone.

I suspect there is more VMS about in such businesses. When I visit small 
places that largely serve to the trade I see terminal emulation and dot 
matrix printers. A couple of years ago I bought a VT540 from a lighting 
supplier

https://www.harrisonlighting.co.uk/

who still had three VT540's in the shop I picked it up from. I guess 
they had 20 or so outlets and were moving from VMS to something else, or 
perhaps just switching from VT terminals to emulation.

On the other had I have made a good living over, I guess 20 years, from 
Microsoft Windows systems. I sat my first Microsoft exam in 1996 as the 
company needed to have two qualified staff members to be part of the 
Microsoft Partners program. (I think I was already a Lotus Notes 
Certified Professional then).

Whilst there was a sticky patch around 2002 when I tried teaching (and 
failed at my first attempt) there have always been jobs on Windows based 
systems.

Those of you who only see the desktop usually poo-poo the back-end 
stuff, but if you look for example the Mail and Messaging and Diary 
Management Market place, I suspect a huge proportion of Businesses 
either run on-site Microsoft Exchange or off-site Exchange on Office 
365. Yes Google is catching up but if you run Exchange, and the Outlook 
Client then you are trapped in a Microsoft world.


When it was launched, I think in 1995 it was a beast of a program. 
Digital tried to leverage it to sell Alpha but what Exchange needs is 
disk throughput, and for that Alpha just didn't deliver any extra 
performance over Pentium.

These days with SSD Exchange is much more manageable beast and despite 
the move to Virtualization there are still plenty of jobs managing and 
maintaining windows systems out there.

Dave