[Info-vax] What does VMS get used for, these days?

[Scott Dorsey]

John Dallman <jgd at cix.co.uk> wrote:
>
>My employers used it as a software development system, producing
>mathematical modelling code for VMS, plus a wide range of other platforms.
>Demand for the code on VMS shrank in the 1990s, and it became expensive
>compared to doing development on Windows. We had dropped it by the year
>2000. We'd resume support if there was significant demand for it on
>x86-64, which is why I joined this newsgroup. 

In the eighties we did a lot of this, and we did this in spite of VMS being
badly-suited for scientific computing.  We did it because the DEC hardware
was the fastest for the dollar and the DEC fortran compiler was the best and
most advanced.  But we spent a lot of time fighting features in VMS that were
advantageous in a commercial data processing environment.

When Sun machines started having better floating point performance for the
buck, we dropped VMS quickly as a scientific programming environment in 
favor of SunOS which was sort of unreliable and worse in a lot of ways
but nobody cared because the machines were fast.

>What do you use VMS for in the 2020s? 

Large scale data processing applications that benefit from the heavyweight
filesystems but aren't totally transaction-based.
--scott

-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."