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

[John Forkosh]

Scott Dorsey <kludge at panix.com> wrote:
> 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

Comparisons over time are goofy. I started programming in the spring
of 1966, with my first job as operator/programmer (putting myself
through undergrad school) in the fall of 1966. At that time there
were ~35,000 computers worldwide, and to say half a mip each would be
generous. So my one little i7 desktop has somewhat more than twice the
processing power that existed on the entire planet Earth at that time.
And disk, memory comparisons are pretty much similar. Moore's law at work.
-- 
John Forkosh  ( mailto:  j at f.com  where j=john and f=forkosh )