[Info-vax] Final Orace release on VMS.

[Chris]

On 11/17/20 09:45, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
> Den 2020-11-17 kl. 10:17, skrev 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).
>>
>
> But, one reason to design new server functions to have a web UI is so
> that you are even less depending on having direct access to the server.
>
> Good and updated web browsers are already available in the standard
> desktop environment that everyone has today anyway.
>
> It would be very weird if every system running a web server out there
> also would require a web browser on the same system for the web server
> to function at all.

Seems to me, a lot of people arguing why VMS should *not* have a web
browser, again relegating VMS to a dark corner of serverism, when every
other major OS has a web browser support and is expected as a standard
feature. You run a web server, then you need a local browser to work on
it ideally, not on another machine elsewhere.

The more capability any system has just increases the possible market
depth and usefulness, but with such attitudes, is any wonder that VMS
is treated as a joke in some quarters ?. It's 2020, not 1985..

Chris