[Info-vax] VAX VMS going forward

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 7/17/20 1:35 PM, John Reagan wrote:
> On Friday, July 17, 2020 at 12:41:58 PM UTC-4, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
>> In article <9513122f-5615-4d7c-b9aa-f97699920cfdo at googlegroups.com>,
>> Alice Wyan <finitud at gmail.comwrites:
>>
>>> If I understand the situation correctly, HPE is completely dropping
>>> support for VAX VMS, but the rights haven't been transferred to VSI.
>>> This means starting next year VMS on the VAX is essentially abandoned.
>>
>> Right.  I can understand VSI having little interest in it; it surely
>> couldn't be justified financially.
>>
>>> If HPE is no longer going to be making money out of it, what would be
>>> stopping them from selling it/give the rights away to, say, a hobbyist
>>> collective that could be set up to preserve this system?
>>
>> Nothing, except that they figure that it is not worth their time.
>>
>>> I guess there'd be quite a legal mess of rights behind the old code,
>>> but...
>>
>> I'm sure that they have a lot of experience with that, and the situation
>> wouldn't be that much different than Alpha or Itanium.
>>
>>> would it be a doable thing?
>>
>> Certainly.
>>
> 
> I have said several times, to several people, in several forums: The day you ask me to starting making VAX compilers again is the day we'll start planning my retirement party.  I ain't got no time for that stuff.  The thought of the VAX VCG and PL/1 (much of the VCG is written in PL/1) is a hard NO.  I will use my safeword on that one.
> 

What happened to the compilers that were used to build VAX
versions in the past?  I would have thought there was one
big archive with everything VAX related in it.  Were they
really so incompetent that they lost some of it?  I would
have expected that all it would really take for someone new
to build a VAX version of VMS today would be to have the
archive and a machine (today, probably an emulated system)
to load it on and run the build process.

bill