[Info-vax] Internationalization

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 12/31/2018 1:04 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 12/31/18 11:36 AM, Dave Froble wrote:
>> On 12/31/2018 7:00 AM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
>>> Well, the world does not stand still. We have a long list of development
>>> projects on our Alpha environment. Both updates to the current apps but
>>> also new applications.
>>>
>>> And I do not think that the Alpha offer from VSI was put together only
>>> for us, so there must be a conciderable number of similar sites.
>>
>> I think that there may be more sites running old Alphas than anything 
>> else.  For sure there were enough for VSI to decide they needed an 
>> Alpha release of their own.  As "their own" HP is out of the picture.
>>
>> I'm rather sure that the first build of "their own" would be the most 
>> labor intensive.  While additional releases will have some cost to 
>> VSI, most likely not near as much, and so perhaps there will be 
>> further Alpha releases.
> 
> Software availability is only one term of the equation.  The one
> easily fixed.  The hardware is not going to be around for much
> longer.

Physical hardware becomes old and fragile.

But emulators does not age the same way.

So "Alpha's" may be around for decades to come.

Similar to the market for VAX emulators.

>> If there is a significant number of sites using Alpha VMS, who are 
>> willing to pay for support, that's chunk of change that VSI needs to 
>> consider and go after.
>>
>> You mentioned perhaps never going off Alpha.  Can you suggest reasons 
>> for that?  DEC made some very reliable stuff, but, in time the costs 
>> and efforts will increase.  I guess my question is, do reasons for not 
>> using x86 when it's available exist?
> 
> A better question would be do (valid) reasons for staying
> on Alpha once a viable alternative is there exist.

The typical reasons for staying on old platform are:
1) some software dependency is not available on the new platform
2) some special hardware is not available on the new platform
3) migration cost too high

#1 will come in effect if some vendors supporting VMS Alpha
will not support VMS x86-64. I believe both PL/I and Ada
may end up in that category.

#2 will probably be rare. I don't think there were ever as much
custom hardware for Alpha as for VAX. And in case of #2 then
emulators are not an option either.

#3 will depend on VSI's approach. Just rebuild and it will run
then #3 is not an issue. If breaking too much then it is
another story.

My guess is that the vast majority of remaining
Alpha users will migrate.

I just suspect that the migration will be very slow.

Those that migrate fast already have migrated to I64.

:-)

Arne