[Info-vax] VSI licencing policy (again), was: Re: VSI has a new CEO

[Simon Clubley]

On 2021-08-09, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <lawrencedo99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Monday, August 9, 2021 at 4:27:34 PM UTC+12, John Dallman wrote:
>
>> [Windows NT] was initially shipped on MIPS, PowerPC and Alpha, and the dropping of 
>> those platforms was because they weren't much used, rather than because 
>> they didn't work. It then shipped on Itanium, which was dropped because 
>> the market preferred x86-64, rather than because it didn't work.
>
> All of which were supported on Linux, and continued to be supported on Linux long after Microsoft had abandoned them. So you see, it wasn?t just a matter of the popularity (or not) of those architectures.
>
> Alpha is an interesting case. In spite of it being a 64-bit architecture, Windows NT only ever ran on it in 32-bit ?TASO? mode. OpenVMS got as far as a hybrid 32/64-bit port, but I don?t think it ever managed to go full 64-bit.
>

The lack of pure 64-bit mode for VMS on Alpha was nothing to do with
Alpha, but was to do with the VMS architecture and choice of implementation
languages.

Unlike with other operating systems where the lowest supported language
is C (with a bit of assembly thrown in for architecture-specific things),
_way_ too much would have broken in VMS code if they had tried to make
it a pure 64-bit environment.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.