[Info-vax] Whither VMS?

[Richard B. Gilbert]

Bob Eager wrote:
> On Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:03:30 +0200, P. Sture wrote:
> 
>> In article <7j7128F34epr5U2 at mid.individual.net>,
>>  billg999 at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:
>>
>>> In article <slrnhcqtmn.n64.rivie at stench.no.domain>,
>>> 	Roger Ivie <rivie at ridgenet.net> writes:
>>>> On 2009-10-08, Bill Gunshannon <billg999 at cs.uofs.edu> wrote:
>>>>> It was  Fortran IV on a Univac 1100 running Exec-8.  Of course, the
>>>>> programs in question were also proof that it is not only C that gets
>>>>> used for the wrong purposes.  These were business applications
>>>>> written in Fortran by engineers who needed something to doto keep
>>>>> them busy during slow summers.
>>>> A friend of mine wrote a compiler in Microsoft's FORTRAN for CP/M.
>>> I know (knew) of at least one commercial COBOL compiler that claimed to
>>> be written in COBOL.  It's not just people writing business apps in C
>>> that are using the wrong tool for the job.
>>>
>>>
>> I remember reading the case for doing that for one of those COBOL
>> compilers, and it seemed pretty convincing at the time. To me anyway.
>>
>> But this brings us to the price of compilers. Most of my customers in
>> the VAX era had a COBOL compiler and that was it. Wrong tool or not,
>> COBOL did get used for systems programming on occasion (and yours truly
>> did it, though only for low volumes of data).
> 
> I was always amazed at the amount of stuff written in FORTRAN. I used 
> something for monitoring users' terminals, and that was in FORTRAN.
> 

Back in the mid 1980s a Fortran compiler for a VAX 11/750 listed for 
something like $5000 AFTER educational discount!

A few years later DEC saw the light and we got C and a whole suite of 
software.  We didn't really need a lot of the other stuff but the 
compilers were a big help.  CMS was handy, it made it pretty easy to 
figure out how and when something was broken and who did it.