[Info-vax] OpenVMS development tooling

[John Dallman]

In article <718c4128-da1e-48db-be3c-24853e29506bn at googlegroups.com>,
lawrencedo99 at gmail.com (Lawrence D_Oliveiro) wrote:

> 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?

Microsoft target Windows at a fairly specific model of computing. A
fairly powerful office client machine, talking to a powerful office
server. They aren't very interested in other markets, as their lack of
success in embedded, phones and HPC demonstrates.

SGI, who owned MIPS, mostly wanted to stick to Irix and stay away from
Windows NT. This varied with company internal politics, hence the SGI
Intel-based machines, which did not sell well. In the mid-1990s, there
were several companies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R4000#Users) that
tried to sell R4x00-based workstations for NT, but none of them were
commercially successful. This was largely because the Intel Pentium
Pro/II/III family would run existing Windows software faster than a port
to then-current MIPS would achieve. 

Windows NT on PowerPC worked OK, but the IBM hardware was extremely
expensive, so did not sell well. IBM never seemed to grasp that they had
to compete on price-performance with Intel-based machines, /and/ get ISVs
who were currently only supporting Wintel to support PowerPC. More likely
they did understand that, but weren't willing to risk the money they'd
have to spend.

John