[Info-vax] VMS survivability

[Scott Dorsey]

Dave Froble  <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>
>A question I'd ask, is, would Linux have done so well, if it was nothing more 
>than "free Unix"?

When Linux was new, that was all it was.  There were some competitors like 
xinu and minix, but Linux actually provided a full functional system.  Because
it was unixlike, there was plenty of existing software for it (including the
whole gnu back catalogue).  Because it was free, the barriers to entry were
very low.

One might ask if VMS would have done so well if it hadn't come with the Vax.
Lots of folks bought VMS because of the hardware, not because of the software.
Those folks were the first to abandon ship when the cheap and fast workstations
came out in the eighties.  (I'm talking here of mostly development folks and 
scientific computing folks who weren't so tied to architecture and who were
very sensitive to price/performance.)
--scott

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