[Info-vax] VAX VMS going forward

[Craig A. Berry]

On 7/17/20 5:26 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> 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.

No one said anything was lost.  The context was the prospect of having
VSI produce a VAX release, which would be necessary before they could
issue licenses (hobbyist or otherwise) for VAX, but which they have said
numerous times they aren't going to do. In that context, John is
obviously talking about *maintaining* the VCG compilers, which he would
have to do if VSI were producing VAX releases.  Or not maintaining them,
since he would quit first.

Now, if some bored computer science students with nothing to do during
the pandemic would update llvm-alpha and produce an llvm-vax code
generator, everything would be gravy :-).  Except John would probably
still quit if he had to make the LLVM-based compilers with the GEM
emulation target VAX since the GEM-based compilers are likely full of
post-VAX assumptions.