[Info-vax] Final Orace release on VMS.

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <rov5sh$10lb$1 at gioia.aioe.org>, Chris
<xxx.syseng.yyy at gfsys.co.uk> writes: 

> 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.

About 25 years ago, I was working somewhere where we had DM 150,000 to 
spend on new hardware.  We calculated DM 100 per MB of RAM!  We borrowed 
new machines from DEC, HP, IBM, SUN, and SGI.  We had IBM RS/6000 
machines at the time.  We ran our own applications for tests.  We 
decided to go with DEC because only HP was almost as fast but the HP 
compilers were much worse than the DEC compilers.  Sadly, not with VMS, 
but I managed to get an X-terminal with LK-style keyboard out of the 
deal.  :-)

Around the same time, I met several other people who had moved to DEC 
for performance, usually running graphical applications on workstations.
Some even moved to VMS.  Things started going downhill when DEC 
announced the alliance with Microsoft and with VMS when DEC salesmen 
started saying that Digital Unix was the future.

> 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...

Right.  It doesn't have to have all the bells and whistles.  In fact, I 
would prefer it not to.  But it should be more than good enough for my 
purposes.  For many things I need, the old Mozilla on VMS was good 
enough, but I had to stop using it because it didn't accept newer 
certificates for HTTPs connections and also because some sites turned to 
JavaScript-heavy sites (which on the fastest hardware available are 
slower than than old one was with Mozilla on Alpha).