[Info-vax] Whither VMS?

[Richard B. Gilbert]

Roy Brown wrote:
> 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.
> 
Hardly anyone does anything on the VAX any longer.  The Alpha 
architecture pretty much replaced the VAX.  Itanic has either replaced 
the Alpha or will replace it except in our hearts! <sob>

> 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.
>

VAX is long over and gone!  It was a "CISC" machine rather than the now 
trendy RISC architecture.  It just couldn't keep up!

> 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.

Welcome to the club!