10 Jan
2002
10 Jan
'02
2:01 a.m.
On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 08:14:25PM +0100, Hans H?bner wrote:
I'm not convinced that it makes sense to keep the
FreeVMS idea up. It just
does not make sense:
- OpenVMS is a mature environment. Maturity and obsolescense are tightly
coupled, but one thing is sure right now: VMS is 24 years old, many of the
Unix is older: 33 years.
ideas which influenced its design where intimately
coupled to the computing
style of the late 1970ies (Minicomputers, CISC, large systems etc.)
They may say minis and mainframes are dead, but it is still mainly words...
A lot of machines with Windows/PC (even Linux/PC) may still not be up to the task...
Supercomputing centres may use a lot of smaller machines instead of Crays,
though, but that is a bit different computing model.
- OpenVMS is complete. Reimplementing even only a
limited subset of VMS would
be a real ambitious effort. Reimplementing it in a portable way would be even
harder, as the operating system is tightly coupled to the design of the DEC
CPUs.
It will be 5.x-ish, because that's the newest complete Internals books.
If what you want is use the coolest operating system
of the world, get a VAX
or an Alpha and run OpenVMS. It's ready to use, it is complete and it is
pretty cool.
Will be using that, too.
-Roar Thron?s