[Info-vax] "x86 has only a few years left in the market place"

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2018-05-20 21:59, seasoned_geek wrote:
> On Saturday, May 12, 2018 at 11:27:18 AM UTC-5, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>>
>> x86-64 has a few years left in the market?  Nope.  The ~billion x86
>> systems in present use and with uncountable numbers of applications and
>> dependencies and users, and a morass of the current scale does not get
>> ported in less than a human generation or two.  And there'll be
>> stragglers through the rest of the century.  Which means servers and
>> products will remain available.
>>
>> As for options and alternatives?   The folks at VSI are pretty savvy.
>> They looked around.   They were already looking around back before VSI
>> became public in 2014, too.
>>
> 
> You know, this little tidbit has been rattling around in the back of my brain since I read it. Why? It sounded sooooooooooooo familiar. DEC has such a fine and upstanding history when it comes to the PC universe. Make no mistake, VMS is being denigrated to the realm of sloppy PC products with the X86 port.

Those same sloppy PC products is pretty much what runs all of Internet 
these days...
Live with it.

> I remember "those in the know" using almost the __exact__ same justification for focusing on CPM with the Rainbow instead of making it fully compatible with IBM DOS.
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100

The Rainbow can run MS-DOS just fine. The problem with DEC and PCs was 
the fact that they tried a bunch of different approaches, but each one 
of them was somewhat incompatible with the baseline, which made them all 
problems in the end. And only because they wanted to protect their other 
business.

DECmate was an incompatible PDP-8, with either wordprocessing, or a 
special version of OS/8 with attempts to prevent normal OS/8 stuff to run.

Rainbow was a slightly incompatible x86 box, which could run CP/M, but a 
bit funnily, and could run MS-DOS, but was incompatible at the low level 
stuff, meaning most programs could not run in the end, after all. (Yes, 
there exists software to enable pretty much reasonable MS-DOS 
applications to run, and even get Windows running on that hardware, but 
the fact is that by requiring those additional pieces of software to 
enable this made it a problem.)

Professional was a slightly incompatible PDP-11, with a slightly weird 
version of RSX, which caused problems for people in general, who wanted 
either a more proper RSX, or run anything but P/OS.


The x86 port seems to explicitly avoid this kind of stupidness which was 
really the reason for the DEC failures in the PC market. (Well, that and 
pricing...)

   Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol