[Info-vax] VMS Software needs to port VAX DIBOL to OpenVMS X86 platform

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2020-12-23 17:41:24 +0000, 1tim.lovern at gmail.com said:

>  I stand corrected. MICA was his baby and a lot of it found its way 
> into VMS, more of it found its way into NT

Work on MICA started well after VAX/VMS was available.

IIRC, with work on VAXELN also happening between VAX/VMS and MICA.

MICA was intended to address various of what had been learned from 
designing and building VAX/VMS.

Little (none?) of MICA was retrofit or otherwise found its way into 
VAX/VMS; into what was later renamed OpenVMS. DEC management decisions 
largely prevented that work from happening.

It would have been interesting to see OpenVMS replaced with MICA, with 
the existing environment kept around as a subsystem for compatibility 
with existing apps. There'd be other work needed to update MICA for 
better contending with more current hardware and limits and tooling and 
expectations. That work seems unlikely, given the current finances and 
expectations and the current market for operating systems. And VSI 
doesn't have MICA source code, and anybody that does have that source 
code is unlikely to share it.

For those interested, there's an archive of some contemporary 
documentation and memos for PRISM and MICA here: 
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/prism/


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