[Info-vax] New CEO of VMS Software

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Fri, 5 Jan 2024 13:27:14 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:

> In article <un81en$l6e$2 at dont-email.me>,
> Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo at nz.invalid> wrote:
>
>>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 would necessarily entail dragging in much of the rest of the
> operating system.

No it wouldn’t. Any more than WINE entails implementing the whole of 
Windows on top of Linux. We don’t need any actual supervisor-mode DCL, or 
kernel-mode drivers, or any actual ACPs/XQPs, only a layer that emulates 
their behaviour, for example. No need for EVL or MPW or the whole queue 
system, because Linux already provides plenty of existing facilities for 
that kind of thing. No VMScluster rigmarole.

> Consider that for both the VAX _and_ Alpha, DEC was able to shape the
> design of the hardware _and_ of VMS simultaneously to match one another.

And yet they were never able to make VMS a fully 64-bit OS, even on their 
own fully 64-bit hardware.