[Info-vax] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.vms/v07C_K7KzCg%5B1-25%5D

[gérard Calliet]

Le 18/08/2020 à 18:26, Stephen Hoffman a écrit :
> On 2020-08-17 14:39:09 +0000, gérard Calliet said:
> 
>> Bigot-ism is part of the problem. We are the users, You are the 
>> Always-in-truth Company. Which is the corollary of "everything is 
>> aknowledged by the majority business is The Real".
>> The counter-theorems being: "the majority business trend killed VMS", 
>> "the successfull ecosystems are collaborative".
>>
>> But yes I do think nethertheless that the VMS ecosystem exists. And 
>> the Community License is the beginning of relaunch of a collaborative 
>> community (you don't have to pay for it).
>>
>> The core values of VMS are:
>> - LOCALITY
>> - CONTINUITY
>> - MAINTENABILITY
>>
>> The 2 first can be summarized by the genial idea of the founders: 
>> mini-computing. (departemental computing, the computer is near its 
>> use, and cannot stop, clustering is to scale and garanty continuity).
>> The 3rd is a consequence of the 2 first.
>>
>> These values are quite the opposite of the main stream of today:
>> - decoralate everything from everything by all ways of abstraction, 
>> delocalize (cloud),
>> - reinvent the wheel as many times as it is for good profit,
>> - distant and global managering.
>>
>> Not to say VMS is good, new world is bad. Just to say they are quite 
>> different. And have to be supported with marketing, training, 
>> development, community management different.
>>
>> The way VMS is in technical revival is awesome. The way it is 
>> distributed and announced, the way VSI and the community does'nt 
>> constitute as a collaborating ecosystem are making the boat in danger.
>>
>> The astounding situation here is that the whole world is now thinking 
>> about return to more locality, to think about sustanibility, to critic 
>> a modernity which forgets its roots, VMS is just totally synchronous 
>> with that... and we sell it as the new gadget of Mr Steve Jobs.
> 
> 
> I'm murky on what your statement and your suggestions might be.
> 
> In no particular order...
> 
> The trade-offs around hardware, and networking, and hardware and 
> software costs, and expectations, and hardware and software 
> capabilities, have all shifted. Substantially. New installations and new 
> apps and app overhauls all have to reflect these shifts. We're no longer 
> suffering VAX constraints on memory costs and storage costs, for 
> instance. Though existing app designs often are. These shifts can and 
> often do then alter the decisions around the chosen locality of 
> computing, of service continuity, and of maintainability.
> 
> For a few examples of these shifting trade-offs, hardware reliability 
> has increased substantially with failures less often and reboots far 
> faster, and spare servers are now far more affordable and even 
> commonplace. And clustering for app scale is less interesting as 
> hardware servers become faster and more capacious.
> 
> Micro-mini-supermini-mainframe-super is a characterization of computing 
> I've not often encountered in then recent decade. Not outside of 
> comp.os.vms. Not when x86-64, and Arm AArch32 and AArch64, have become 
> ubiquitous throughout most of computing, outside of IBM mainframes.
> 
> "Edge" is probably closest to departmental computing, in the 
> contemporary distributed design (or design marketing) usage.
> 
> Differentiating a local or private cloud and a hosted cloud and a data 
> center? I'll leave that debate to others.
> 
> As presently implemented and presently used, OpenVMS itself is closer to 
> an embedded operating system; an environment where the app developer 
> also manages the operating system.
> 
> "Gadget" sells short the efforts involved in design, tuning, 
> communications, UI, and production.  App code alone is a small part of a 
> product. Productization, production, distribution, design, services and 
> support, documentation or the ability to render documentation 
> unnecessary, and the rest of the efforts involved are far less often 
> recognized, but necessary. VSI owns all of this, as does any other 
> commercial vendor.
> 
> We can and will see echos of computing's past, but we're never going 
> back. And as I've grumbled, reacting to customers' requests is useful 
> and necessary incremental work, but that isn't going to get a vendor 
> into a new market.
> 
> Where OpenVMS fits in 2030—and how to get there—is a job for the folks 
> at VSI. This is what VSI should be and is focused on. Customers are 
> certainly a part of these calculations, but VSI needs to be looking five 
> and ten years out; to be positioned. And how to have products that will 
> be interesting to customers in three or five years.
> 
> As for this collaborative ecosystem", I'm a little murky there.  VSI 
> marketing and communications do have some opportunities for 
> improvements, yes. And tiny company, huge product, pandemic, way too 
> much work, too little time, etc., are all factors, too.
> 
> 
> 
Hey Stephen, do you know the difference between a concept and a peculiar 
reality?
THE CONCEPT here is about was the IDEA creating mini-computers.

Example: carrots, onions and potatoes are VEGETABLES; we can say that 
VEGETABLES are good for your HEALTH; you don't give a recipe by saying 
take 3 VEGETABLES and put them in a frying pan.

The same thing here. Ken Olsen and some others had the genius to invent 
the CONCEPT of mini-computing, which refers to the CONCEPTS of locality, 
continuity, departmental computing, scaling by cluster additions, 
maintainability as close as possible to its use, as opposed to the 
CONCEPTS of hierarchical and universal mainframe.

Nowadays behind the cloud and virtualization there are CONCEPTS of 
universality, maximum abstraction, non-locality. These CONCEPTS can be 
well adapted sometimes. There are more COMPARABLE (as IDEAS) to the 
main-frame solutions, and not with the IDEA which was the source of the 
mini-computer solutions.

I continue to think that VMS will be much more adapted to what will 
necessarily emerge in an era where hyper-delocalization, abstraction, 
will show their limits, as an OTHER WAY OF THINKING that time has 
preserved and that WILL REMERGER. These are IDEAS, Stephen, not 
day-to-day news like by CNN or FOX NEWS.

And I continue to think that it is also THOUGHTS that started the 
computer world. I don't think we would have invented the FIRE or the 
WHEEL if we had just been content to observe the difficult trends of 
prehistoric agriculture, even by producing about them the best 
encyclopaedias.