[Info-vax] Final Orace release on VMS.

[Chris]

On 11/16/20 00:57, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 11/15/20 6:34 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 11/15/2020 3:50 PM, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
>>> In article <rorp0g$jc$1 at panix2.panix.com>, kludge at panix.com (Scott
>>> Dorsey) writes:
>>>> Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) <helbig at asclothestro.multivax.de>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> In article <i1cslrF4e2jU1 at mid.individual.net>, Bill Gunshannon
>>>>> <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> writes:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Laugh if you will, but, actually, there is a business case for
>>>>>> desktop
>>>>>> to data-center.
>>>>>
>>>>> Back when DEC used that slogan, it were a very successful company.
>>>>
>>>> This is true, but they were also selling totally different and
>>>> incompatible
>>>> systems for the desktop and the data center.  In fact, they had
>>>> several totally
>>>> incompatble desktop systems competing against one another, which I
>>>> suspect
>>>> is why it stopped being so successful.
>>>>
>>>> They were not promoting one system from desktop to data center, just
>>>> one
>>>> vendor.
>>>
>>> Many places had VMS workstations on desktops booting as satellites from
>>> a much larger VAX or Alpha.
>>
>> Sure.
>>
>> But that was a tiny fraction of desktop market.
>>
>> Probably more developers and system managers than
>> end users.
>>
>> Remember that the desktop market as such is counted in
>> hundreds of millions of users.
>
> Today, maybe, but at the time when the VAX was first doing this
> the market was much smaller and very fragmented. Proprietary
> Word Processing Systems. CP/M. Some very limited Unix. MS
> had not yet taken over the world. DEC gave up before the first
> shot was fired across their bow.
>
> bill
>
>


I'm sure this has been done to death, but DEC a had a wide variety
of workstation class gui machines comparable in performance to Sun or
HP kit of the day. Mips, Alpha and Vax all had a desktop gui
environment as a standard feature, with the graphics option
hardware added. Microvax II GPX, 8 plane colour. Mono graphics as
well. There was even a graphics option for the Vax bi machines,
which sold as the Vaxstation 8000, though the card came from E&S,
fwir. Ultrix, Tru64, VMS, all came with a X11 desktop out of
the box and it really was desktop to data center.


There will be a browser for VSI VMS sooner or later. Why ?, because
so much kit has been designed to be configured via an html browser for
decades now. Networking kit, ilom and Java based apps all depend
on a browser to run. Understand the timescale pressures, but it
will be needed sooner or later...

Chris