[Info-vax] relaunch or legacy

[John Dallman]

In article <j5ft5nFfrrtU1 at mid.individual.net>,
gerard.calliet at pia-sofer.fr (Gérard Calliet) wrote:

> VSI rigorously ignores the work of our association - except 
> for courteous answers without real content. 

If you could express yourselves much more concisely, you might get better
results. Your English style is full of grand-sounding phrases, but they
definitely obscure the points you're making. 

As far as I can tell, you're saying that concentration on the x86 port is
misguided because the customers don't want to switch platforms. Thus, VSI
needs to concentrate on supporting Itanium and Alpha systems. Is that
(one of) your points? 

The difficulty with that approach is that nobody builds Alpha or Itanium
chips any more. Nor are the circuit boards, memory chips, disk drives,
and other vital components of those old systems available. All of these
things will eventually break down, but nobody can predict when an
individual component will fail. Customers who rely on old hardware will
eventually loose the use of their systems, at an unpredictable time. I'm
sure you're aware of this, but it is not clear what you propose as an
alternative to this, or x86 porting. 

The only alternative I can see is the "Unisys approach", using software
emulators of Alpha and Itanium hardware to run Alpha and Itanium software
on modern hardware. The difficulties with that include:

* The complexity of emulating Itanium
* VSI's experience is of porting VMS, not emulating it. 
* The inevitably greater energy consumption of an emulation approach. 

Do you have an alternative proposal? 

John