[Info-vax] VMS survivability

[ultr...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, February 19, 2023 at 3:17:07 PM UTC-5, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> Dave Froble <da... 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."

WHICH IS WHY YOU NEED AN INEXPENSIVE BARE METAL PLATFORM ...