https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.vms/v07C_K7KzCg%5B1-25%5D

[gérard Calliet]

Hello,

Now I'm about to be 64, as in the beatles song, and much more close to
retirement than in 2014.

I was searching comp.os.vms archive for the advice of some of my gurus
(no name), and I found this topic.

What is striking me in the quoted topic is the way the micro-community
of comp.os.vms is often constructing its advice.

Perhaps the sentence of our community is "nothing new under the sun".

The way VSI redoes Digital, the way we worship The company, the way VSI
redoes the old tricks to do a "good business" are very similar the way
we were here moking the "french fight the dead of OpenVMS". Nothing can
change is our faith.

Such persistence in conservatism has something moving about it.

On my side, however, I do like museum, but I don't think VMS has to go
now on museum, and so I hope the old guys can think anew about new times.

I'm very found of my Great Britain foreigners, and I do like New
Hampshire - I visited with emotion The Mill -. But I cannot think
rebuilding the Common Wealth after the Brixit could be successfull, as
rebuilding a centralized new Digital (the Terry "clearing house") could
ever be a success.

The only chance for VMS is to rebuild its ecosystem with new paradigms,
and to build on its core values by assessing how interesting they are in
the period.

The models which can be successfull now are more horizontal. VSI is
already present on two continents. We know all of the failure for
Digital has been the difficulty of coordinating all its entities. What
has been a trap for Digital which was struturally centralized could be a
condition for success for VSI if they "think different", and create way
of collaborating business in several places.

The good topology for emergent startup is archipello. And the
(anti-"clearing house") good marketing sentence is "VMS is good for Your
business". If VSI is able to encourage myriad of little consultant
companies to make good business with VMS, the world wide support will be
efficient, sustainable, visible. Another way of saying that, which we
learned from Open Source business ecosytems is: "be fair, it's worth it".

The other side of the for-profit archipello is the non-fo-profit
initiatives on Open Source for OpenVMS. An ecosytem has a lot of
different aspects, not only the for-profit aspects. Question the
more-than-64-year-old guys who redo VMS about their motivations.

The good news is the core values of VMS meet a major trend of these
days: end of waste, sobriety, sustainability, reusability. It is on
these values that VMS will prove that it is innovating in a completely
new way, that is, by making new out of old.

It is no coincidence that VMS finds itself bought into a green group,
but it is surprising that what is certainly an underground motivation is
so little exploited in organizational thinking and promotion.

In the twenty next years there will be huge transformations in the way
products are done, and in the way we choose usefull things againts
gadgets. The same thing on computers. Here the values of VMS will meet
the new challenges, for sure.

But we cannot fight for VMS, sell VMS, develop VMS the way it was done
by Ken Olsen. We could have been the world company like Apple, and we
had not this chance. For sure we'll not be a new Apple or a new Oracle.
These adventures are now already for-musuem business paradigms. So we
cannot sell VMS as a common product, nor develop the suppliers as they
developped thirty years ago.

If VSI develops its activity, partnership the way did HP, I agree on the
sentence "nothing new under the sun". The way I have been moked on
comp.os.vms is totally right: as we had seen HP (after Compaq) acting
for VMS there was no future for VMS. And it seems VSI acts as HP acted.
So? It is not coincidence if VSI is beginning doing off-shore, as HP did
to lowering costs. Duane Harris brought back VMS from India, and the
general logic is reforwarding it. Under the sun, the same causes have
the same effects.

See you in four or five years. Maybe there was some truth in "the French
fight the death of OpenVMS", and maybe there is still some truth here.
In any case, if my optimism at the time has been confirmed, and if some
of my ideas here can be used, then we will be enjoying together a huge
success.

Gérard Calliet

[El SysMan]

Post by gérard Calliet
The only chance for VMS is to rebuild its ecosystem with new paradigms,
and to build on its core values by assessing how interesting they are in
the period.

Excellent!
By recruiting new bigots ?! Pay VSI for license and become by members of "ecosystem" ?

[gérard Calliet]

Post by El SysMan

Post by gérard Calliet
The only chance for VMS is to rebuild its ecosystem with new paradigms,
and to build on its core values by assessing how interesting they are in
the period.

Excellent!
By recruiting new bigots ?! Pay VSI for license and become by members of "ecosystem" ?

Bigot-ism is part of the problem. We are the users, You are the
Always-in-truth Company. Which is the corollary of "everything is
aknowledged by the majority business is The Real".
The counter-theorems being: "the majority business trend killed VMS",
"the successfull ecosystems are collaborative".

But yes I do think nethertheless that the VMS ecosystem exists. And the
Community License is the beginning of relaunch of a collaborative
community (you don't have to pay for it).

The core values of VMS are:
- LOCALITY
- CONTINUITY
- MAINTENABILITY

The 2 first can be summarized by the genial idea of the founders:
mini-computing. (departemental computing, the computer is near its use,
and cannot stop, clustering is to scale and garanty continuity).
The 3rd is a consequence of the 2 first.

These values are quite the opposite of the main stream of today:
- decoralate everything from everything by all ways of abstraction,
delocalize (cloud),
- reinvent the wheel as many times as it is for good profit,
- distant and global managering.

Not to say VMS is good, new world is bad. Just to say they are quite
different. And have to be supported with marketing, training,
development, community management different.

The way VMS is in technical revival is awesome. The way it is
distributed and announced, the way VSI and the community does'nt
constitute as a collaborating ecosystem are making the boat in danger.

The astounding situation here is that the whole world is now thinking
about return to more locality, to think about sustanibility, to critic a
modernity which forgets its roots, VMS is just totally synchronous with
that... and we sell it as the new gadget of Mr Steve Jobs.

[Stephen Hoffman]

Post by gérard Calliet
Bigot-ism is part of the problem. We are the users, You are the
Always-in-truth Company. Which is the corollary of "everything is
aknowledged by the majority business is The Real".
The counter-theorems being: "the majority business trend killed VMS",
"the successfull ecosystems are collaborative".
But yes I do think nethertheless that the VMS ecosystem exists. And the
Community License is the beginning of relaunch of a collaborative
community (you don't have to pay for it).
- LOCALITY
- CONTINUITY
- MAINTENABILITY
mini-computing. (departemental computing, the computer is near its use,
and cannot stop, clustering is to scale and garanty continuity).
The 3rd is a consequence of the 2 first.
- decoralate everything from everything by all ways of abstraction,
delocalize (cloud),
- reinvent the wheel as many times as it is for good profit,
- distant and global managering.
Not to say VMS is good, new world is bad. Just to say they are quite
different. And have to be supported with marketing, training,
development, community management different.
The way VMS is in technical revival is awesome. The way it is
distributed and announced, the way VSI and the community does'nt
constitute as a collaborating ecosystem are making the boat in danger.
The astounding situation here is that the whole world is now thinking
about return to more locality, to think about sustanibility, to critic
a modernity which forgets its roots, VMS is just totally synchronous
with that... and we sell it as the new gadget of Mr Steve Jobs.

I'm murky on what your statement and your suggestions might be.

In no particular order...

The trade-offs around hardware, and networking, and hardware and
software costs, and expectations, and hardware and software
capabilities, have all shifted. Substantially. New installations and
new apps and app overhauls all have to reflect these shifts. We're no
longer suffering VAX constraints on memory costs and storage costs, for
instance. Though existing app designs often are. These shifts can and
often do then alter the decisions around the chosen locality of
computing, of service continuity, and of maintainability.

For a few examples of these shifting trade-offs, hardware reliability
has increased substantially with failures less often and reboots far
faster, and spare servers are now far more affordable and even
commonplace. And clustering for app scale is less interesting as
hardware servers become faster and more capacious.

Micro-mini-supermini-mainframe-super is a characterization of computing
I've not often encountered in then recent decade. Not outside of
comp.os.vms. Not when x86-64, and Arm AArch32 and AArch64, have become
ubiquitous throughout most of computing, outside of IBM mainframes.

"Edge" is probably closest to departmental computing, in the
contemporary distributed design (or design marketing) usage.

Differentiating a local or private cloud and a hosted cloud and a data
center? I'll leave that debate to others.

As presently implemented and presently used, OpenVMS itself is closer
to an embedded operating system; an environment where the app developer
also manages the operating system.

"Gadget" sells short the efforts involved in design, tuning,
communications, UI, and production. App code alone is a small part of
a product. Productization, production, distribution, design, services
and support, documentation or the ability to render documentation
unnecessary, and the rest of the efforts involved are far less often
recognized, but necessary. VSI owns all of this, as does any other
commercial vendor.

We can and will see echos of computing's past, but we're never going
back. And as I've grumbled, reacting to customers' requests is useful
and necessary incremental work, but that isn't going to get a vendor
into a new market.

Where OpenVMS fits in 2030—and how to get there—is a job for the folks
at VSI. This is what VSI should be and is focused on. Customers are
certainly a part of these calculations, but VSI needs to be looking
five and ten years out; to be positioned. And how to have products that
will be interesting to customers in three or five years.

As for this collaborative ecosystem", I'm a little murky there. VSI
marketing and communications do have some opportunities for
improvements, yes. And tiny company, huge product, pandemic, way too
much work, too little time, etc., are all factors, too.

[gérard Calliet]

Post by Stephen Hoffman

Post by gérard Calliet
Bigot-ism is part of the problem. We are the users, You are the
Always-in-truth Company. Which is the corollary of "everything is
aknowledged by the majority business is The Real".
The counter-theorems being: "the majority business trend killed VMS",
"the successfull ecosystems are collaborative".
But yes I do think nethertheless that the VMS ecosystem exists. And
the Community License is the beginning of relaunch of a collaborative
community (you don't have to pay for it).
- LOCALITY
- CONTINUITY
- MAINTENABILITY
mini-computing. (departemental computing, the computer is near its
use, and cannot stop, clustering is to scale and garanty continuity).
The 3rd is a consequence of the 2 first.
- decoralate everything from everything by all ways of abstraction,
delocalize (cloud),
- reinvent the wheel as many times as it is for good profit,
- distant and global managering.
Not to say VMS is good, new world is bad. Just to say they are quite
different. And have to be supported with marketing, training,
development, community management different.
The way VMS is in technical revival is awesome. The way it is
distributed and announced, the way VSI and the community does'nt
constitute as a collaborating ecosystem are making the boat in danger.
The astounding situation here is that the whole world is now thinking
about return to more locality, to think about sustanibility, to critic
a modernity which forgets its roots, VMS is just totally synchronous
with that... and we sell it as the new gadget of Mr Steve Jobs.

I'm murky on what your statement and your suggestions might be.
In no particular order...
The trade-offs around hardware, and networking, and hardware and
software costs, and expectations, and hardware and software
capabilities, have all shifted. Substantially. New installations and new
apps and app overhauls all have to reflect these shifts. We're no longer
suffering VAX constraints on memory costs and storage costs, for
instance. Though existing app designs often are. These shifts can and
often do then alter the decisions around the chosen locality of
computing, of service continuity, and of maintainability.
For a few examples of these shifting trade-offs, hardware reliability
has increased substantially with failures less often and reboots far
faster, and spare servers are now far more affordable and even
commonplace. And clustering for app scale is less interesting as
hardware servers become faster and more capacious.
Micro-mini-supermini-mainframe-super is a characterization of computing
I've not often encountered in then recent decade. Not outside of
comp.os.vms. Not when x86-64, and Arm AArch32 and AArch64, have become
ubiquitous throughout most of computing, outside of IBM mainframes.
"Edge" is probably closest to departmental computing, in the
contemporary distributed design (or design marketing) usage.
Differentiating a local or private cloud and a hosted cloud and a data
center? I'll leave that debate to others.
As presently implemented and presently used, OpenVMS itself is closer to
an embedded operating system; an environment where the app developer
also manages the operating system.
"Gadget" sells short the efforts involved in design, tuning,
communications, UI, and production.  App code alone is a small part of a
product. Productization, production, distribution, design, services and
support, documentation or the ability to render documentation
unnecessary, and the rest of the efforts involved are far less often
recognized, but necessary. VSI owns all of this, as does any other
commercial vendor.
We can and will see echos of computing's past, but we're never going
back. And as I've grumbled, reacting to customers' requests is useful
and necessary incremental work, but that isn't going to get a vendor
into a new market.
Where OpenVMS fits in 2030—and how to get there—is a job for the folks
at VSI. This is what VSI should be and is focused on. Customers are
certainly a part of these calculations, but VSI needs to be looking five
and ten years out; to be positioned. And how to have products that will
be interesting to customers in three or five years.
As for this collaborative ecosystem", I'm a little murky there.  VSI
marketing and communications do have some opportunities for
improvements, yes. And tiny company, huge product, pandemic, way too
much work, too little time, etc., are all factors, too.

Hey Stephen, do you know the difference between a concept and a peculiar
reality?
THE CONCEPT here is about was the IDEA creating mini-computers.

Example: carrots, onions and potatoes are VEGETABLES; we can say that
VEGETABLES are good for your HEALTH; you don't give a recipe by saying
take 3 VEGETABLES and put them in a frying pan.

The same thing here. Ken Olsen and some others had the genius to invent
the CONCEPT of mini-computing, which refers to the CONCEPTS of locality,
continuity, departmental computing, scaling by cluster additions,
maintainability as close as possible to its use, as opposed to the
CONCEPTS of hierarchical and universal mainframe.

Nowadays behind the cloud and virtualization there are CONCEPTS of
universality, maximum abstraction, non-locality. These CONCEPTS can be
well adapted sometimes. There are more COMPARABLE (as IDEAS) to the
main-frame solutions, and not with the IDEA which was the source of the
mini-computer solutions.

I continue to think that VMS will be much more adapted to what will
necessarily emerge in an era where hyper-delocalization, abstraction,
will show their limits, as an OTHER WAY OF THINKING that time has
preserved and that WILL REMERGER. These are IDEAS, Stephen, not
day-to-day news like by CNN or FOX NEWS.

And I continue to think that it is also THOUGHTS that started the
computer world. I don't think we would have invented the FIRE or the
WHEEL if we had just been content to observe the difficult trends of
prehistoric agriculture, even by producing about them the best
encyclopaedias.

[Stephen Hoffman]

Post by gérard Calliet
Hey Stephen, do you know the difference between a concept and a
peculiar reality?

My own reality tends toward "peculiar".

Though I suspect "particular" was meant there.

A quick ponder did find the existence of Peculiar Realtors, for those
planning to pull up stakes to purchase property near Peculiar.

Post by gérard Calliet
THE CONCEPT here is about was the IDEA creating mini-computers.

Minis and superminis are constructs approaching a half-century in age,
and the subsequent two- and three-tier client-server premise, a market
largely subsumed by microcomputer servers, if not yet smaller boxes. In
the current vernacular, this organizational structure is known as "edge
computing".

I'm far more interested in ten or twenty years ahead though, and less
about re-hashing the last-millennium of
micro-mini-supermini-mainframe-super positioning.

That old ideas are remixed and re-thought is hardly perspicacious.

That the mid-range market tends to be pummeled is also not particularly
newsworthy.

Where things become piquant with product design is in positing,
producing, and promoting new ideas and new mixes. Alas, seldom recently
seen around OpenVMS.

Less loquaciously, it's about the next ten years, and then the next
ten, and less about the last ten. The x86-64 port is the priority, then
broadening hardware support, tooling upgrades, and hopefully UI-related
overhauls for system management including ease of use, app development
and tooling, and on security befitting the marketing. VSI has a
prodigious list of potential projects.

[gérard Calliet]

Post by Stephen Hoffman
Less loquaciously

Less loquaciously, it's just about why Digital became the first or
second world computer company: because a strong idea met real needs.

I don't care about the thousands of details you can provide to be the
one who doesn't hear because he doesn't want to. You were five years ago
in the herd who was "thinking" there will not be a future for VMS. You
were wrong I was right. And perhaps what I'm thinking about now, and
about you don't care, is just what about in five years the herd will
aknowledge as right.

You make me laught with your contradictions. The same Stephen says there
will be ten years to achieve the transition to x86, and the same Stephen
repeats the common chorus "x86 is THE priority". During this ten years,
the poor fools like the customers I'm (really) fighting for, who will
remain on Alpha and "itanic" thank you for your peremptories.

The second idea, after why Digital became Digital, is why VMS didn't
die. I think you cannot say anything about that, because you were
thinking five years ago, examining your crystal ball, VMS will die. On
my side I think VMS didn't die for the same reason Digital became great.
The idea which meet the needs. And VMS was upon to die because the
reason that made Digital great were a lot less fashionable in our times.

We can again examine a chrystal ball, to take the good choices for the
VMS future. Or we can THINK about the fondamental reasons. The needs
that make VMS survive are to be addressed, and what you said about the
ten years with Alpha and Itanium neighbours is part of that.

Even if it is sad to admit, VMS addresses a very little segment of
market. The major market is addressed by billion dollars companies, and
I don't know how many dollars has been invested for VMS, but it doesn't
go to billions. We are very small players, and our chance is only to
address accurately our market that the big players are not interested in.

Our market includes the needs for continuity (the poor fools still on
Alpha and "Itanic"), the necessities of locality (you know, for example,
the nuclear plants, which cannot be maintained via DevOps bright
solutions), the philosophy of sobriety, reusability, minimal use of
black boxes (thinking structuration, quality and mastery, not quantity
and probability).

Because the major trends is somehow the opposite : delocalisation,
hyper-abstraction, probalistic extraction of meaning, and because the
huge and immediate profits are with these major trends, VMS cannot be
selled the way the majors sell their jam. Sell different, think
different. And, sadly, we'll not become for the ten next years as rich
as Mr Bill Gate, too bad.

Fifteen years ago, the ecology was seen as dream for weed smokers. Now
the billionairs think investing on the Green Development. My woodstock
cousins have a good laugh.

The ten years after the ten years, if I'm still there, I'll use a cane,
and I suppose I'll have retired. But I'm sure the computer solutions
which rest on sobriety, locality, mastery will have got a good market
segment (not at all the majority), because the companies or users who
will have use them will be proud to have escape a lot of dangers,
compared to the bright and healthy solutions. It is already the case for
important companies I know.

So:
- x86 is a priority, yes; making the life of the poor fools on Alpha and
itanic is also a priority (CONTINUITY)
- VMS is not a washing machine; don't sell it the same way Mr Bill Gates
sells its "solutions",
- VMS is an ecosystem, use the community resiliency as a strength (and
guys, please, awake, be proud, and engage !)
- market about VMS on its essential qualities, let the new trends about
sober, green, sustainable development meet these essential and already
here qualities of VMS,
- let the young people go into this big adventure by a lot of
initiatives (community license, community management, free training,
standard open source development,...).

Sorry, Stephen, I have been loquacious. The difficulty with the ideas is
we have no more means to expose them than just speaking, a word after
another. Compared to billions unnecessary agile transactions by second
we are just primitive apes.

Gérard Calliet

[gérard Calliet]

Post by Stephen Hoffman
That old ideas are remixed and re-thought is hardly perspicacious.

Same mistake. A concept is not a recipe. Galilean reorganisation of
phisics is a concept. We don't reuse the recipes he constructed with his
conscept, but we are heirs of his concepts.

I do like cooking, I like (O'Reilly) cook books. Not my interest here.

[Phillip Helbig (undress to reply)]

Post by Stephen Hoffman

Post by gérard Calliet
Hey Stephen, do you know the difference between a concept and a
peculiar reality?

My own reality tends toward "peculiar".
Though I suspect "particular" was meant there.
A quick ponder did find the existence of Peculiar Realtors, for those
planning to pull up stakes to purchase property near Peculiar.

It's like "actual". In most languages other than English, the cognate
means "current", so a common mistake is to say something like "it is of
no actual interest" when one means "it is of no current interest".
(Bonus points if you spot the reference.)

Similar, cognates of "peculiar" usually mean "particular". Usually,
"peculiar" in English, today, means "strange". There are other
examples, though, such as "peculiar velocity", which is used to
distinguish individual from collective motion in astronomy.