[Info-vax] Vax Station 4000 VLC

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Friday, 28 December 2018 22:27:41 UTC, Arne Vajhøj  wrote:
> On 12/28/2018 4:13 PM, johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk wrote:
> > And things like the POSIX standards recently mentioned are
> > neither open source nor really free.
> > 
> > The POSIX standards are vendor neutral, and at one time were seen
> > by some people as the way of the future, because POSIX-compliance
> > would allow people and knowledge (and code and ...) to be usefully
> > transferred between POSIX-compliant systems in a largely
> > compatible way:
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX
> > 
> > Even VMS had a POSIX-compatibility subsystem (in the general
> > sense).
> > 
> > MS thought they would have to join the POSIX bandwagon, but
> > in their usual fashion they didn't initially deliver much of
> > technical relevance.
> > 
> > Then when Redmond decided that they could again get away with
> > not delivering much at all (given that the huge MS-dependent
> > ecosystem would have little option other than to Follow The
> > Leader), POSIX itself became less relevant.
> 
> Windows NT and 2000 had an optional POSIX subsystem.

Windows NT and 2000 had an optional POSIX subsystem that was based
on an early flavour of POSIX e.g. it didn't deliver POSIX threads 
and POSIX sockets. The difference between snake oil and "stuff that 
does useful things", perhaps. Nice work for those who can get away 
with it, the rest of the world had the likes of Cygwin and Mingw or 
maybe a couple of MS-sponsored short-lived packages (SFU, SUA?).
For those who wanted to build and deploy nontrivial Linux-centric
software in an environment where the IT department was certified 
MS-dependent, there was plenty of "fun" to be had. (E.g. building
a custom gcc toolchain to run on Windows desktops to generate code
for a non-commodity target processor).

Windows 10 (or whatever it's called) seems to have grown some kind 
of Ubuntu-compatibility layer. Will it still be there in two years 
time? Some people may not care, others whose products are intended
to have a slightly longer lifetime might want to investigate further.

> 
> Windows 2003 and 2008 had an optional "Windows Services for Unix".
> 
> Windows 2016 had aan optional "Windows Subsystem for Linux".
> 
> >                                             Doesn't mean things
> > like POSIX were a bad idea, does highlight the short term
> > disposable software+systems mindset of the typical 'modern'
> > one-solution-fits-all commodity IT crowd.
> > 
> > Meanwhile, Sun/Solaris has gone, HPUX has largely gone, Win16
> > and Win32 are on life support, and GNU/Linux is largely taking
> > over the commodity world, even if folk choose to ignore the
> > facts.
> 
> Windows 64 bit is doing OK.
> 
> And AIX also still exist but are probably close to being on life support.
> 
> > Over at IBM, MVS is apparently still with us, although IBM's
> > purchase of red hat will be interesting.
> > 
> > VSIVMS seems to be still around too, even if their corporate
> > website's homepage 'news' is mostly still stuck in early 2018?????
> 
> IBM also got 'i' aka OS/400, but that is probably also on
> life support.
> 
> Linux is doing great. Windows is doing OK. And the rest are on
> various levels of problems.
> 
> VMS is probably better than most other from an organizational
> perspective - VSI is VMS only - IBM, Oracle, HPE etc. are all
> selling Linux besides their traditional offerings.
> 
> Arne