Re: New Vax - future directions :-)

[Alexander Schreiber <als%thangorodrim.ch@localhost>]

On Tue, Jul 06, 2021 at 02:40:46PM -0400, Paul Koning wrote:
> 
> 
> > On Jul 6, 2021, at 2:12 PM, Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost> wrote:
> > 
> >>>> Curious - what would the commercial implication be if, say, a new VAX
> >>>> architecture were to take shape in the FPGA world?
> > 
> > Commercial?  None, probably; it strikes me as unlikely that anyone has any
> > commercially relevant applications for VAXen, and if there are any they are
> > probably severely hardware-specific (eg, existing custom Qbus hardware) and
> > thus irrelevant to Ragge's FPGA VAX.
> 
> VMS is still a commercial product, supporting a (probably small) company.

Not just commercial product, there is still development going and VMS
is now on its machine architecture (VAX, Alpha, Itanium, AMD64). They
are apparently currently accepting early adopters and there is promise
that there quite possibly might be a non-commercial, hobbyist release.

They decided not to burn tons of engineering time on hardware support and
instead target virtualization platforms (KVM, Virtualbox, VMWare) - which
I think was a pretty smart decision.

> Come to think of it, there are even people who earn a living, or part of one,
> from PDP-11 systems.

IIRC a lot of those are often deep inside industrial systems - you don't
throw away millions of $ of perfectly serviceable industrial hardware
because the control system doesn't run the newest OS. In fact, _not_
running the newest, shiniest, cloud-connected OS on your industrial
control plane is probably a plus wrt to operational stability these days.

Kind regards,
           Alex.
-- 
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
 looks like work."                                      -- Thomas A. Edison