[Info-vax] For sale: VAXstation 4000/90 128MB Fully Working and Tested

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 7/2/2022 10:08 AM, John Reagan wrote:
> On Thursday, June 30, 2022 at 9:58:17 AM UTC-4, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 6/29/2022 10:01 PM, Dave Froble wrote:
> 
>>> VSI is currently supporting VMS, and porting it to x86 ...
>>> VSI is currently (I hope John) supporting Basic ...
>>> The auditing firm is a bunch of crooks ...
>> There are some reasons for concerns:
>> - niche OS (VMS)
>> - niche language (VMS Basic)
>> - obsolete language (Macro-32)
>> - probably non-optimal persistence technology (RMS index-sequential
>> files aka NoSQL Key Value Store)
>> - the team getting close to retirement
>>
>> But it is not an urgent problem:
>> - all the software is supported and can be expected to be
>> supported for many years
>> - the team has not retired yet
>>
>> What you need is a roadmap showing a long term viable future.
>
> OpenVMS has other niche languages as well.  Our Pascal full of extensions (many
> from the Extended Pascal standard but available nowhere else so they might as well
> be considered vendor-specific).  Some vendors have attempted to convert Pascal to
> C but it looks ugly (IMHO).

Yes.

But neither VMS Basic nor VMS Pascal are difficult languages to learn.

Not the normal curly bracket style, but to pick a random combo - someone
that know C, Java and PHP should be able to learn those languages
relative quickly.

> As for retirement, I have no short term plans to retire.  What would I do?  Just sit around all
> day on comp.os.vms and complain?  ;)
> 
> And I did send in my DNA to 23AndMe so my DNA has been sequenced and is on a computer
> somewhere.

:-)

But relevant question: have you trained new people in the VMS compilers?

Arne