8 May
2007
8 May
'07
6:36 a.m.
At 10:35 PM -0700 5/7/07, Don North wrote:
I can understand that Mentec might be making money from
ongoing
monthly support contracts, but I fail to be convinced that Mentec is
making any money from selling *new* PDP-11 software licenses. Do do
so would assume the deployment of 'new' currently unlicensed PDP-11
systems, which I would think is highly unlikely at this point. Where
would the hardware come from, other that used equipment liquidators
selling old systems? The only other application would be running
PDP-11 applications on new E11 (or Charon) or SIMH platforms, which
to me seems laughable from a business perspective.
I know for a fact there are new installations going on periodically.
I also know someone who purchased a new license from them in the last
two months.
If I went into *any* vendor at this point and saw they
were running
their computing environment on PDP-8s/PDP-11s I'd immediately run
for the nearest exit.
Then you don't want to know who I sold a couple PDP-11's to a few
years ago. :^)
As I and others have mentioned here before there are reasons for
this. In some cases it works, so why mess with it. Those are the
ones that will typically move to an emulation based solution when the
hardware breaks, at least they do if they can't easily obtain
replacement hardware.
In other cases there are requirements to recertify any new hardware
or software. Such certifications can cost in excess of a Million
Dollars (yes, US Dollars). Situations such as this are why things
such as working RD53's and RA81's command a premium.
In other cases the computer is connected via very specialized
interfaces to very expensive equipment. This is where companies like
Strobe Data and their PCI-to-QBus/Unibus expansions come into play.
This likely falls at least partially into the second example, some
manufacturing processes specify a certain configuration with zero
changes for "X" years. New plants designed to manufacture the same
item have to be built exactly the same.
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |