[Info-vax] Programming languages on VMS

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Monday, 12 February 2018 22:25:12 UTC, Robert A. Brooks  wrote:
> On 2/12/2018 5:18 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> > On 2018-02-10 04:18:23 +0000, DaveFroble said:
> > 
> >> Consider a mfg company, which is what Jan Erik has.  IT is a
> >> necessary expense.   Not directly something that produces income.
> >> 
> >> The purpose of a mfg company is to produce goods, which are sold,
> >> thus creating profits.
> >> 
> >> Now, if, and that is a valid question, the IT system is meeting the
> >> company's requirements, why would the company waste money to
> >> replace their IT system?  As requirements change, the system(s) can
> >> be modified to reflect changing requirements.  But rarely, if ever,
> >> will things change so much that the current IT system is so far
> >> away from requirements.  It just doesn't happen.
> >> 
> >> So, replacement of the entire system just isn't going to happen.
> > 
> > When next the manufacturing line gets rebuilt, the folks will be
> > looking for upgrades and replacements.  They may decide to upgrade
> > and to re-use their existing software, but they also routinely look
> > around to see what other process control offerings and platforms are
> > available.  More than a few of these folks use an outside vendor
> > here, too.   It's this outside vendor and this replacement cycle that
> > VSI and other vendors and particularly the app partners need to be
> > ready for and competitive for, too.
>  
> And VSI is ready to provide the industry-leading suite of OMNI products
> (OMNIAPI, OMNIMMS, OSAP/H1, OSAP/S7, OSAP/AP) for your shop floor
> automation pleasure.
> 
> -- 
> 
>                       -- Rob

Thanks, always good to be reminded that these things are 
still around, for the benefit of folks whose IT isn't just
about producing documents and serving web pages, or even
just about reliable financial transactions.

Once upon a time, you could put BASEstar on top of these
OMNI things, and do distributed real-time data management,
and distributed real-time application synchronisation 
(with BASEstar apps and device apps effectively as peers),
and a whole shedload more.

On top of that, there was an above-BASEstar layer including
things like an event-driven (and/or pointy clicky)
programming language, CIMfast, which could also talk to
things like whatever DECmessageQ was called at the time.

And as well as CIMfast there were various nice and simple
(or, for those who preferred it, complex and customisable)
graphics package for building process mimics and such 
like without needing to know about GUIs, just needing to
know what kind (and what name) of data needed connecting
to what kind of display object (and vice versa too).

Those things, on a trustworthy and reliable platform 
with a stable technical and commercial future, might 
possibly go down quite well with the kind of folk 
that are now interested in what's currently being 
called Industrie 4.0 - if the various bits of glue 
and whatnot were still around.

Or does everyone do it all in SAP these days? After all,
evedryone uses SAP these days don't they, what could 
possibly go wrong?