[HECnet] discontinuance of VMS

[Ian McLaughlin]

Now that HP have effectively discontinued VMS and associated hardware (I know - a few years out, but once you announce a sunset date, it's basically over) are we going to see hoarding of harware?   Are Ebay prices going to start going up?

Has anyone talked to HP as to their intentions with the hobbyist program?   It would be nice to see them hand over an officially-sanctioned PAK generator to the community - do you think we will ever see that day?

Ian

On 2013-06-06, at 8:26 AM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:

On 06/06/2013 11:13 AM, Gregg Levine wrote:
Damn!

I work in federal govt and we have numerous (3 digits) VMS hosts world-wide t=
hat never gave us any trouble (especially compared to windoze).=20

Really?   According to HP's Lorraine Bartlett VP BCS Marketing & Strategy who
gave a keynote at the recent OpenVMS Bootcamp in mid-March, there were less
than 200 VMS customers and none were in Gov't.

So is she clueless, or is she a liar?   Resellers were still offering big
bucks for VAX-7800 CPU modules as recently as ~2 years ago, specifically for
the Pentagon.   And those are VAXen, for chrissakes!

I, and those in attendance, knew better.

Hello!
Improperly briefed.

If she needed to be "briefed" on how many VMS installations there are, at a
VMS conference, she was either the wrong person to send to that conference,
or she needs to be fired.

According to those unnamed sources we all know of, the same government
offices who're using forty year old software to fly our planes,
(civilian) are still using PDP-11 based systems for those specialty
functions that were never brought to the VAX. Hardware as well as
software.

And it gets stranger, there are still some agencies who are using
S-100 based systems for those applications which actually could never
be placed on a PC or server, or otherwise.

Of course.   And as well-trained consumers, we are expected to see this as a
problem.

I still use a handheld digital multimeter (Fluke 77) that I got 22 years
ago.   It still works great, holds its calibration, and does its job well.
But if I were a proper American, I should've thrown it in the trash 15-17
years ago and purchased a new one, for no valid reason.

This crap just makes me sick.

                            -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA


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