[Info-vax] Whither VMS?

[Roy Brown]

In message 
<6c2c1453-0cc6-456d-98a1-708087f0d813 at v36g2000yqv.googlegroups.com>, 
MetaEd <metaed at gmail.com> writing at 06:50:59 in his/her local time 
opines:-
>On Oct 9, 10:06 pm, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber... at comcast.net>
>wrote:
>> Back in 1960 [...] computers were few and far between and used vacuum tubes!!
>
>Actually computers were common at that time, but required maintenance
>operations we no longer think of as relevant to computing, such as
>Maternity Leave.

Indeed so. I still recall that definition from my 1954 Schools Oxford 
Dictionary.

But as to the question in the subject of this thread.....

The short, and sad, answer is I fear "away".

I'm a VAX newbie, but have a thirty-year exposure to the rather similar 
HP3000 minicomputer and its MPE operating system.

Like VAX/VMS perhaps, its heyday is past, but much more severely so. 
Those wonderful people who inherited the VAX when they bought Compaq 
decided a few years ago to discontinue the HP3000 line.

They never sold (or retained as customers) enough of them to reach the 
critical mass for a port to Itanium; and their rather quirky accounting 
practices reassigned the money earned by the HP3000 such that the money 
spent on the HP3000 made it look unprofitable.

So it dies with PA-RISC, or perhaps even sooner. No emulator [1], no 
migration tools, just the end of the road. Make an expensive move to 
HP-UX maybe, go your own way, or 'homestead' - keep the (officially) 
unsupported box running as long as third-party support is still 
available.

Compared with this, the issues with an OS that is still actively 
supported and developed by HP, available on Itanium or on a 
well-respected emulator, don't amount to a hill of beans. Perhaps.

Still, just like there was in the HP3000 community before HP killed the 
box, there's the talk here of what the future might be. Like the HP3000, 
and like the AS/400, here's a mid-range box with a fanatically loyal 
user base, a loyalty earned by years of ease of use, reliable service, 
economical performance, and often set-and-forget operation in a field 
where the competition seems to be all high-maintenance - whether 
mainframe or PC - and , in one way or another, just not in that 'sweet 
spot' where all the parameters combine to deliver up an ideal machine to 
work with, for developer and user alike.

I say the VAX and the HP3000 are alike - certainly, they plus the AS/400 
constitute a group apart from other machines in the marketplace. VAX and 
HP3000 both have COBOL, FORTRAN, a network database, a good scripting 
language, good editors. Both VMS and MPE have evolved across major 
hardware changes with upward compatibility such that you could run the 
binaries from the old hardware straight on the new hardware. Both have 
made a major push towards POSIX compatibility.

You could argue that the VAX is superior to the HP3000 in several ways - 
people don't by and large do graphics on the HP3000 like they do on the 
VAX, DBMS has a few features I'd like to have seen in MPE's TurboImage, 
and I'm told that clustering lets VAXes scale more nicely. But perhaps 
VMS file structures are needlessly(?) more complex than MPE ones - 
though both are more so than UNIX bytestreams.

But 'commercial usability and reliability' just isn't enough any more. 
Today's alternatives, while still perhaps not as good, are usually good 
enough. And all the other advantages these machines once had are traded 
off against the sheer weight of software, and the availability of 
expertise, on Windows and Unix boxes.

Pricing, too, at least superficially. The mini was always squeezed 
between the mainframe, waiting for the system that ran out of grunt, and 
the micro, waiting to grow up and challenge its bigger brother. 
Increasing hardware capability meant minis could always have enough 
grunt, seeing off the mainframe threat; but it also helped those micros 
grow up, and they just ate away at the mini market from below.

I guess people used to buy VAXes just to get a computing capability, as 
well as to run a particular application. I could be wrong, but I think 
HP3000 users pretty much always bought their machines with an 
application in mind - even if they planned to write it.

But today I'd guess that apps which run only on VAX or HP3000 are few 
and far between; and if you want a computing capability, you get Unix or 
Windows, because the possibilities are so endless - possibilities you'd 
cut yourself off from, or at least make more complex to use, if you laid 
in a VAX for that purpose.

Place I am now, practically grew up on DEC, and later VAX. High-tech 
engineering, a few packages, a lot of bespoke FORTRAN. But now, there's 
an intractable perception, both from IT management and the business 
(even if it isn't always shared by the people who wrote that code, back 
in the day, if they are still around) that VAX is over, dead if not 
quite gone.

My job here is to help give the remaining VAXes the last rites; find 
those applications that are still in use on the 'ageing hardware', get 
them ported over or replaced. I point out that they could go out 
tomorrow and buy a brand new set of hardware to run the current OpenVMS 
8.3, all available and currently supported; I get strange looks.

So, here's the paradigm VAX user perhaps, used it for years with lots of 
good results, few or no complaints - can't wait to get off the platform. 
What hope for anyone else?

We're going the way of Wang, Data General, and Prime - all spin-offs 
from DEC in their day, ironically; and all now dead and gone.

[1] There's talk of one, at least. But that's all, so far.




-- 
Roy Brown        'Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be
Kelmscott Ltd     useful, or believe to be beautiful'  William Morris