[OT] VMS, was: Re: Could you write a BSD like os in ADA?

[Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP>]

On 2016-08-23, Bob Broderbund <bbroderbund@broderbund.com> wrote:
>
> VMS is a good OS but it's far behind MVS and seems to be suffering from a
> loss of (management) direction and not enough cash.

That latter bit is putting it mildly. :-(

> It probably started
> going downhill when it moved from being owned and managed end-to-end by one
> company to today where it is spread across two companies for software and
> another one or two for hardware.
>

HP still supply hardware and software support for VMS running on HP
supported hardware. The VSI effort is a recent effort (relatively
speaking) and is targeted to completely new platforms for VMS; it has
absolutely nothing to do with the decline of VMS within HP.

The lack of investment in VMS within HP has been going on for at least
a decade and the impression I have as a former HP VMS customer is that
HP were doing the minimum needed in terms of investment to keep VMS
somewhat alive (for various values of somewhat).

For example, around 2010 (+/- a year or so) HP got rid of VMS engineering
(along with the VMS engineering staff) within the US and replaced it with
some HP India based operation. Some of the former VMS engineering staff
are now working at VSI.

> IBM is still throwing a lot of money into z/OS and the hardware and it is
> still a multibillion dollar ecosystem. I don't know what the safety critical
> people use for hardware but if you have the money there isn't anything
> better for safety critical than an OS that stays up 5 nines without the need
> for clustering or much of anything at all on the administration side.
>

It would be nice if you could run z/OS on Hercules under a VMS style
hobbyist program. Might be an interesting OS to play with.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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