[Info-vax] Info-vax Digest, Vol 78, Issue 28

[Jack Blake]

Dave Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>> On 10/31/2019 10:45 PM, Kerry Main wrote:
>>
>>> They all laughed and one of them stated he could not remember when they had
>>> a VAX HW problem.
>>>
>>> Good testament to the VAX HW, but not so good for new sales.
>> And doesn't that sort of depend on whether you're the vendor, or, a
>> customer?
>>
>> Then there was the AlphaStation 200 power supplies.  Dropped like flies.
>>
>> Getting 3 years out of today's PCs is very good luck.  And that's with
>> HW in general being more robust.

Can we dispel this myth?  DEC didn't fail because their hardware was too 
good, DEC failed because they didn't change with the times, and ever 
company that has purchased the rights to what DEC made, which was good, 
has continued to fail for exactly that same reason.  It's almost as if 
it's a curse at this point.  Not that that will happen to the current 
VMS caretakers...

I'm probably what you would call a millenial, I'm a hobbyist who would 
very much like to turn my knowledge and experience of running VMS into a 
career, but a clear example of how stupid DEC was, it is virtually 
impossible for me to learn how anything works except to ask questions of 
people who already know, and all anyone can really tell me is how their 
own install works and how they've built things to work for them.  It's 
like trying to learn how Windows works by figuring out how other people 
use it.  Back in the day, I'd have learned from a local admin or I'd 
have had to pay to go to classes on it.  Those don't exist anymore.  I 
own a copy of every book ever published on VMS.  There aren't many.

DEC failed because they had the cloistered mindset of Massachusetts 
techies.  And they wondered why hippies thought tech people were 
exclusionary and probably evil.