[Info-vax] OpenVMS development tooling

[David Goodwin]

On Wednesday, September 29, 2021 at 1:53:03 PM UTC+13, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
> On Wednesday, September 29, 2021 at 12:46:26 PM UTC+13, Arne Vajhøj wrote: 
> 
> > Except for the x86 to x86-64 port they were not commercially successful ... 
> 
> Wonder why, when several of those architectures did go on to be commercially successful, the proprietary OS failed to follow, but the open-source one did?

MIPS: The first port (before even x86): Support was dropped after NT4 SP1 because
probably no one was making MIPS workstations anymore besides SGI. And SGI
was playing around with moving to x86 (the very much not IBM PC Compatible
SGI Visual Workstation that ran NT) before deciding on Itanium.

Alpha: Dropped after Windows 2000 RC1: Compaq killed Alpha.

PowerPC: Dropped after NT4 SP2: IBM abandoned the platform. They stopped selling
the PowerSeries PCs and Thinkpads, killed the OS/2 Warp 3 port.

Itanium: The CPU was a dud. Support was dropped after Windows Server 2008 R2
because no one cared about Itanium.

Microsoft stopped selling Windows for these platforms because the companies
that owned these platforms stopped selling them. Not much point selling 
Windows for the IBM PC Power Series if IBM isn't selling Power Series PCs anymore. 
Microsoft isn't in the vintage computing business.