[Info-vax] New CEO of VMS Software

[Dan Cross]

In article <uneg09$1497f$1 at dont-email.me>, chrisq  <devzero at nospam.com> wrote:
>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 :-).

Well, yes, but also DG, HP, etc.  SGI and Sun seemed to do it
right, but then I was on the technical side and didn't have to
worry too much about the business side of folks who were keeping
track of licenses, etc.

>Have an RS6000 machine here, aix 6 from memory,

I'm sorry. :-D  The first AIX machine I administered was running
3.2.5; I think the last I personally had a hand in ran 4.1.3.

>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.

I remember hating it.  Coming from a more "traditional" Unix
background, it was ... weird.  Printing, storage management,
man pages, the security infrastructure, all felt gratuitously
different for no real reason.  You were almost forced to use
their menu-driven management tools, but as the USENIX button at
the time said, "SMIT happens."  It all felt very big-M
"Mainframe" inspired.  The compilers were very good, and the
machines were fast, but the developer tools weren't bundled and
I remembered fighting a lot of third-party software to get it to
compile and run properly.

That was all weird because, on the 6150 ("RT") machines they had
offered a very nice version of 4.3BSD Tahoe plus NFS to the
academic community; clearly, people at IBM knew how to "do" Unix
right.

Weirdest for me was the lack of a real console.  There was a
3-digit 7-segment LED display that would cycle through various
numbers as the system booted up; things that would have been
emitted to a serial port on a VAX (or even a Sun) were instead
represented by random collections of digits, and there was a
book you had to look at to see what was going on if something
hung.  Something like "371" was "fsck failed on /usr."  (I don't
recall if that was the exact code).  Then were was a the damned
key, where the system wouldn't boot if it was in the "locked"
position.  Which sucked if the machine crashed for some random
reason.  I walked into a lab one day and the entire network was
down because all the machines had crashed over some network
hiccup and the damned sysadmin had turned everything to "Locked"
for some obscure reason ("it's more secure.")  I guess he was
right: it's certainly more "secure" if no one can use the
computers.  :-/

>>> 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.

Ha, yeah, my SPARC hardware down in the basement hasn't been
turned on in years: it's too expensive to run.

>> 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 :-)...

The trend had already started before that, I'm afraid.  A lot of
former Sun people I know acknowledged that they tried to stick
with SPARC as a differentiator way longer than they should have,
and that they should have embraced x86 much earlier than they
did.  They had a head-start with the Roadrunner, but they gave
up.  Had they stayed with it, perhaps life would have been
different.

Oh well.

	- Dan C.