[Info-vax] Internationalization

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 1/1/19 2:49 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> 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.

Beat DEC in every benchmark we ever ran when competing
for RFP's.

> 
> 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.

By 1988 Pr1me had shot themselves in the foot and were doing
little other than selling other people's hardware running Unix.
Not much of a differentiator there.  But you originally said
1983-1984.

> 
> 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.

More VAXes in academia were running BSD than VMS.  Although I
do remember two specific VMS academic sites from that period.
But that was late 80's already.

> 
> 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.

Well, that coould have helped a lot.

> 
> 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.

As I said, based on personal experience with a major contractor
who bid DEC as well as alternatives, depending on the RFP, in
the early 80's it would not have been due to technical superiority.

bill