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by kristopolous 814 days ago
Right. Good luck getting new users.

VMS has been dead for decades. If they want to attract new users they should make better choices

Them, like ArcaOS and OS 2200 are living in some wild fantasy land. There's, at least in theory, ways to revitalize these products but it's not going to happen by digging larger moats

More people are probably still using CP/M then all of those put together
2 comments
Locutus_ 814 days ago
New VMS users? Why lord would anyone want to do that, they floated some crazy idea of VMS on Intel Atom as a IoT platform as if that made any sense some years ago during the migration trajectory.

Somehow this seems like one of those idea's that many legacy-niche-OS developers imagine themselves in, it's old, uses little memory (and does little) so now it must be feasible as a embedded-OS, AmigaOS-oid developers imagined the same in the early 00's...

However about total amount of users I don't fully agree, there's significant deployments of VMS still around in the infrastructure and finance sectors. Although some very high profile customers have migrated away on to Linux using compatibility layers.

And within that subset there's customers that still have high performance requirements making them willing to invest in VMS on new hardware.

If you ran VMS on a GS1280 (64 Alpha CPU's, split into 2 32CPU partitions), then migrated to several generations of SuperDome's (Itanium) and your work-load is still scaling with your wider company demand, bare metal deployments on latest x86 hardware of VMS can perfectly make sense.

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rbanffy 814 days ago
Maybe they want to compete for MCP and GECOS users. VMS is the new MULTICS killer.
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mikewarot 814 days ago
MULTICs has capability based security, VMS is stuck in the world of access control lists. (But OpenVMS 7.2 runs just fine in the virtual VAX 11/780 in my smartphone)
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rbanffy 814 days ago
Sorry. I was being sarcastic.
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Locutus_ 814 days ago
MCP's Architecture struck me as absolutely amazing and fascinating when i read about it.

Bull released a MCP VM demo development kit, I tried really hard to set it up and write some simple ALGOL for it.

If anything it thought me to appreciate how MULTICS/UNIX (and aside the pdp10 world) gave us line oriented developer-focused interactive environments that don't make ones eyes bleed.

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rbanffy 814 days ago
It's no coincidence the villain in Tron is called MCP. As a former colleague who managed an A-series mainframe, MCP is actually very user-friendly. It's just that it's extremely picky about its users.
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