[Info-vax] New CEO of VMS Software

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Fri, 5 Jan 2024 03:09:37 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:

> I think, again, you are talking at cross-purposes: my suspicion is that
> Arne is referring to a VMS compatibility layer built on top of Linux,
> not the effort of porting VMS to x86_64.

I thought I made it pretty clear early on that I was only talking about 
porting across userland executables and DCL command procedures--just the 
parts of VMS that users care about, nothing more.

> That said, VMS was not originally written for portability and wasn't
> ported to anything other than successive version of the VAX for the
> first 10 or so years it existed ...

And being typical of proprietary software, think of the layers of cruft 
the code will have accumulated, first in the move to Alpha, then Itanium, 
and now AMD64. All without ever really becoming a fully 64-bit OS.

> Linux was ported to the Alpha pretty early on (sponsored by DEC; thanks
> Mad Dog). So Linux filed off a lot of portability sharp edges for the
> machines at the time pretty early on, when it was still pretty small;
> VMS not so much.

Which is reinforcing my point, is it not? That Linux stands a good chance 
of being able to take on enough of a VMS layer to make VMS itself 
unnecessary.