[Info-vax] Internationalization

[Dave Froble]

On 1/1/2019 8:13 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> 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.

Don't forget BLISS.  The beginnings of BLISS was developed at CMU.

Pitt, CMU, and Penn State all had VMS.  As did many others.

I liked the PDP-6 at Pitt.  That system taught one a lot about the 
basics of computers.

> 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
>


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