[Info-vax] relaunch or legacy

Arne Vajhøj arne at vajhoej.dk
Wed Feb 2 15:36:06 EST 2022


On 2/2/2022 3:27 PM, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 2/2/2022 11:53 AM, Gérard Calliet wrote:
>> It is about freezed application which have to live a long time. For 
>> example
>> appications strongly certified (because of big danger, or garanties 
>> about human
>> lives,...). The application, hardware, maintenance operations have to 
>> be the
>> same for decades. There are companies who garantie that. It's named in 
>> france
>> "Maintenance en Condition Opérationnelle".
> 
> Let me attempt to address this point.
> 
> There are no guarantees.  I learned this a long time ago.  An entity can 
> make some "guarantee", but that guarantee is good only as long as that 
> entity chooses to make good on it, or that entity ceases to exist.
> 
> DEC no longer exists.  Any guarantees DEC made to anyone are now worthless.
> 
> VSI is not DEC.  VSI has no commitment to make good on DEC guarantees.
> 
> VSI is a rather small company.  They are limited in what they can do.  
> They cannot build new VAX systems.  They cannot build new Alpha 
> systems.  Nobody I know would want to build new itanic systems.

Not even a big company could make money on those.

> As far as this topic is concerned, there are no guarantees that mean a 
> damn thing, and that includes x86 systems.  They will not last forever.  
> They are available now, but will they be available in 10 years?  20 
> years?  Perhaps not. And so you should see that there are no 
> alternatives for your desires for systems to last forever.  Salesmen 
> might make promises.  The promises will sooner or later not be kept.

Given the market position x86-64 has today then it is going to take
a very long time before x86-64 could be totally gone.

It would take like 5-10 years before a new ISA became "the ISA".

Then it would take like 10 years before production of x86-64 would stop.

And the it would take like 10 more years before the hardware was
too old and unreliable for production usage.

That is probably as good as it gets in this business.

Arne



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