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

[chris]

On 10/15/22 02:35, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> 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
> 


I ran a microvax II GPX for a for a few years, but the first Sun 3 in
the lab here ran rings round it performance wise. Using a crude Tex
source processing benchmark, the uvax II managed 4 pages per minute,
while the Sun managed more than 20. Tcp/ip networking, nfs, a wide
selection of tools and even a basic C compiler to get started, made
it such good value for money and reliable with it as well. Didn't
return to the DEC fold until Alpha, but by then, it was too late...

Chris