[Info-vax] Programming languages on VMS

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Thursday, 1 February 2018 23:11:01 UTC, seasoned_geek  wrote:
> On Thursday, February 1, 2018 at 4:38:01 PM UTC-6, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> > 
> > Who is "you"?  The secretary?  The Credit Union Manager?
> > The PC weenie down the hall who is lucky if he can install
> > a printer?
> > 
> > Of course, you are describing systems that cost more than
> > the entire credit union's value but that's OK.  Very few
> > people in this group actually live in this reality.  :-)
> > 
> 
> No, I'm describing the original Software As A Service model. A canned system completely supported and maintained by the vendor. It's been around since before the 1980s. Not just credit unions either. Car, motorcycle and truck dealerships have all subscribed to this model for decades. A handful of badge anointed BSVs (Business Systems Vendors) were available for dealers to choose from. They didn't hire IT staff. One employee was shown how to stick a tape in a drive and the nightly backup just happened. All other maintenance was handled by the vendor.
> 
> There was a time in the 1980s when VMS and the MicroVAX world were designed for lights out operation. Most of the mundane tasks you mentioned could be handled by a correctly written batch job which ran on a regularly schedule basis. Hell, I know of steel mills which had MicroVAX IIs running in rooms polluted with PCBs so people weren't allowed to enter very often. Fully managed remotely.
> 
> As to the prices on such systems they weren't as much as one would think. Usually $20-60K up front then an annual maintenance contract running $10K or less per year.

Wtf? Where do those prices come from?

A variety of household name retail chains in the UK 
used to use DEC kit and vertical-specific software 
in the branch to run the branches, back in the day.

Hardware was already sufficiently cheap and downtime 
sufficiently expensive that if a "technical courier" 
(ie taxi driver plus a bit of training) couldn't fix 
a problem in a very few minutes, a complete FRU 
replacement would happen (FRU = ready to run system 
unit, swappable disk drive, monitor, printer, backup
and archive drive, etc).

Unfortunately, in the 21st century, downtime seems
to have become the industry standard, and businesses
in general have little reason to worry about its 
impact. Just as poor security seems to have become
the industry standard and most managements seem to
be immune to any consequences.