[Info-vax] Internationalization

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/1/2019 4:00 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 1/1/19 2:49 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> 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.

According to Wikipedia then Prime actually peaked revenue wise in 1988.

>                                      But you originally said
> 1983-1984.

No.

I said "before mid 90's".

Somebody else talked about 1982-83.

>> 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.

There were a lot of VMS in academia back then.

Just the physics guys had tens of thousands of DECnet nodes
on SPAN/HEPNet. US, Switzerland and other places in Europe.

(there may have been a few PDP-11 or VAX Ultrix among them but
mostly VAX VMS)

CMU must have used VMS since they developed a TCP/IP stack for it.

Columbia had some VMS.

Lots of universities in UK, Germany and the Nordic countries as well.

>> 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.

Such decisions are always a mix of many things technology, price,
vendor support, skills availability, experience etc..

Arne