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

[Scott Dorsey]

chris  <chris-nospam at tridac.net> wrote:
>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. 

That's not exactly the zippiest vax around, and a Sun-3/50 might be a 
fair match for it although at lower cost.  Sun's more serious
offerings would blow it away but to be fair so would DEC's more serious
offerings.

>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...

That was a lot of it... BSD Unix came with everything included, and 
VMS really didn't.

A few years later we got into a situation where people could run jobs
on their Sparcstation 10 faster than they could run them on our Cray-2.
Sometimes it took a couple days for a job to sit in the run queue
on the Cray before it got executed.  The Sun took a lot longer to run
the job, but you could run the job immediately without having to fight
for time.
--scott

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