4 Aug
2014
4 Aug
'14
7:48 p.m.
On Aug 4, 2014, at 3:48 PM, John H. Reinhardt <johnhreinhardt at yahoo.com> wrote:
In the Q&A section of the conference recording,
one of the questions was specifically about the Hobbyist program and it was said that they
are fully intending to keep that up as well as the educational program. I would not
expect VSI to let the hobbyist program go as Sue (Skonetski) was very active in it during
her last years at HP.
With Sue in her role, I'd be very surprised if anything bad happened to the Hobbyist
Program.
About the only bad news in this announcement is the
fact that they only have the license for the Integrity port and to do the x86_64 port.
The license does not cover VAX or Alpha so there will be no new VAX support past v7.3 (not
surprising) nor Alpha v8.4 (rather disappointing) and any fixes and enhancements done in
Integrity or x86_64 will not be back-ported either by VSI nor quite probably HP. Vintage
hardware will retain the vintage software.
John H. Reinhardt
Even as someone that only owns VAXen and Alpha hardware, I don't view this as a bad
thing. It makes sense to focus on platforms that you can buy new hardware for. Now what
I would like to see is for them to make an effort to allow VAX 7.3 and Alpha 8.4 systems
cluster with newer hardware.
Zane