[Info-vax] Possible VMS jobs - City of New York Fire Dept

[Michael Moroney]

Dave Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> writes:

>On 10/26/2019 6:26 PM, Michael Moroney wrote:

>> Port VMS code from VAX to Itanium, just recompile and relink, right? HAHAHA,

>Well, for some it was just that simple, or at least not too bad.

>The biggest problem we ran into is that on VAX we were incrementing the 
>AP as we read the arguments.  Macro-32 compiler didn't like that.  The 
>fix was rather simple.

>The other minor problem was some dummy who was playing with descriptors, 
>and was using the wrong descriptor definition.  Only one subprogram. 
>The interesting thing is, Alpha didn't throw an error, the itanic did.

>See, I was wrong once ...

Depends on the module and its original author I am sure.  I was not involved 
with porting to Alpha myself but heard stories.  Things could be tricky, 
especially if they tried to use tricks to speed things up or something. With us 
many were simple while others seemed to be computer science projects trying to 
implement everything from recursion to (one case of) self-modifying code. The 
widespread use of what amounted to home-grown overlays was a pain. I do 
remember it was lucky that an Itanic page size happened to match a PDP-11 
segment size or whatever it was called (8 8K chunks)

Yes it should have been ripped out for VAX and by us for Itanic but it was a
priority to get it going quickly and to be bug-for-bug compatible.

They never did manage to port TECO, it was VESTed instead.