[Info-vax] New CEO of VMS Software

[chrisq]

On 1/7/24 14:04, Dan Cross wrote:
> In article <une6iq$12vd9$1 at dont-email.me>, chrisq  <devzero at nospam.com> wrote:
>> On 1/6/24 23:42, Dan Cross wrote:
>>> [snip]
>>> Or FreeBSD.  Or OpenBSD.
>>
>> Been running FreeBSD for years now, Works out of the box on various
>> architectures and a base install takes  around 20 minutes. Ditched
>> Linux as it became more bloated and especially, the systemd trainwreck,
>> which I saw as a power grab by RedGat. Gross amount of complexity added
>> for no good reason. Having said that, have Suse and xubuntu installed
>> on a couple of machines, for software compatability testing reasons.
>> Always liked Suse Linux in the past, but again systemd, the disease
>> that has infected so many Linux distros.
>>
>> As for licensing, and having been around many vendor's unix offerings
>> for decades, the only onerous licensing was associated with third
>> party apps, where a license manager needed to be installed to run
>> the app. Embedded C cross compilers, real time os, and tools,for
>> example.
> 
> AIX licensing was a pain.

A single example :-). Have an RS6000 machine here, aix 6 from memory,
and was able to download a whole set of updates from the IBM site
without a single question about licensing. Filled in a form, then
got an email when the update set was ready. Seems some don't like
aix, but just another unix under the hood. The built in system
management and diagnostic tools are some of the best i've seen
anywhere. Probably expensive formally, but no worse than DEC in
the old days, or Sun since the Oracle takeover.

> 
>> With Sun, the os came with the machine and you could do more or
>> less what you wanted to do with it. A full set of tools and basic C
>> compiler out of the box. If you had the hardware, the os revision
>> for that hardware release was perpetually licensed. Compared to a
>> greedy DEC, some still wonder why Sun became so successful...
> 
> Ah SunOS.  In so many ways, the Unix par excellence.  It was sad
> when they unbundled the C compiler and ditched the BSD kernel
> with the switch to SVR4.  SunPro was not cheap.
> 

Yes, it was. Remember one company around 1990 that bought one of
the early Sun 3/60 workstations. Pushed the boat out for the full
colour 19" display, maxed out memory and storage, and we were
all blown away by the machine, capabilities and performance. It
was a few years later, doing comparisons between a uVax GPX, VMS
and a Sun 3/60, compiling Tex source and the Sun 3 was 4-5 times
faster.

Spent years working and programming DEC, but such hard work to get
anything done on VMS for s/w development, compared to the unix.
Everything an added cost, very little open source, when by then.
a whole raft of open source from ftp sites for Sun machines. Then
Sunsites all over the world helping to spread the word.
Different business model and target market I guess, but never
looked back to DEC since.

Only switched off the last Sparc box here around a year ago. No
problem with the system, but the cost of energy now makes it
totally uneconomic to run some of the older hardware 24x7.

> I remember seeing the writing on the wall when a friend of mine
> was showing me a Pentium PC: "It's about half the speed of a
> SPARCstation-5, but a quarter of the cost."  Then they ditched
> their core business to concentrate on Java standards.  That's
> when it was obvious Sun was going to fail: it was just a matter
> of time.
> 

Perhaps Sun did lose their way a bit, but it was the early 90's
recession, the dot com boom crash, that caused the most damage.
Dozens of companies went bust and in some ways, that culture
of innovation and progress has never recovered since. It's been
an interesting journey though :-)...

Chris

> 	- Dan C.
>