[Info-vax] Internationalization

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/1/2019 2:02 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 1/1/19 11:21 AM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
>> Den 2019-01-01 kl. 01:10, skrev Bill Gunshannon:
>>> On 12/31/18 7:01 PM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Same reasons as today to not use VMS. A new HW platform doesn't
>>>> change much for those that do not want to stay on VMS anyway.
>>>
>>> But if your customer is already on VMS maybe the question
>>> should be why did they choose VMS in the first place.
>>
>> Why they choose that VAX 11/750 in 1982-83?
>> It was probably a logical decision at the time.
> 
> Based on what?  At that time Pr1me was still going strong
> and beat DEC in every benchmark I ever saw.  There were
> others as well, depending on what you were planning on
> doing.

Of course there were alternatives including IBM.

But for some years DEC did pretty well.

I have no idea about how a Prime computer technically
stacked up against contemporary VAX'es.

But VAX'es sold well.

In 1988 Prime had revenue of 0.6 B$ and DEC has revenue
of 13 B$. That is a factor 20 difference.

The world was VMS friendly in those years.

VMS was big at universities - CS, physics, economics,
business administration, chemistry, biology, astronomy
etc.. The presence in economics and business administration
may have been more important than the presence in CS
for DEC sales numbers.

The big consulting companies sent their new people to
VMS training as part of their basic training. When I took
a VMS application programming course there were a bunch of people from
Artur Andersen (Accenture today) - they were right out
of university and the company started their training by
having them learn VMS application programming.

There were alternatives and sometimes the alternatives
were picked.

But unless it was an IBM only company, then VMS was
probably almost always considered. And as a consequence
it was often picked.

For good reasons or for bad reasons.

Arne