[Info-vax] VAX VMS going forward

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 7/20/20 6:11 PM, Craig A. Berry wrote:
> 
> 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.

VAX VMS isn't maintained now.  Hasn't been for, I don't klnow, a
decade maybe.  No one is asking for it to be maintained. The
assumption was (at least on my part) that the archive of the
system used to create the last release of VAX VMS still existed.
If that is the case all that should need to be done is to load
it on a system (probably emulated and thus likely to be much faster
than the system last used to build it) and run the build scripts.
I always thought VMS engineering was professional enough (at least
when it was still done by people like Hoff)  that the system was
smooth and maybe even documented.

If desired they could change the startup banner to reflect VSI
taking over, but no change to any of the code would be necessary.

> 
> 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.
> 

If they weren't the compilers used in the past, why would you need
them now for a "one-off" run?

bill