[Info-vax] OpenVMS development tooling

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 9/28/2021 9:07 PM, David Goodwin wrote:
> 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.

The distinction between PowerPC and Power is a pretty thin.

> 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.

Yes.

The only current success where Windows has not been successful must be ARM.

ARM is very successful. Microsoft has not given up on ARM and are
still trying, but so far without success.

Arne