Aside from my former employer, I can’t imagine many companies are still using VMS because they like it, but rather because “it’s been running on that weird old server back there that hasn’t been powered off in 15 years and nobody knows how to do anything on it”. If any company is going to take the effort to migrate to new hardware (and a version of the OS that hasn’t had years of testing) and recompile all of their applications, I have to think it would be much less effort and smarter for the long-term to migrate to a more widely supported platform.
Yeah, at a previous job we did maintenance for an old embedded system. A complete rewrite/update was in progress, but until it was finished and had feature parity we were stuck doing maintenance on VMS because it was the only platform supported by our dev tools (a Jovial compiler targeting iRMX).
It was definitely a “We’re using it because we have to” situation.
A funny story, though, a little bit before I started they had switched to a VAX emulator running on a single PC, because they couldn’t find parts for the massive real VAX sitting in the lab. Switching to the emulator cut compile times down from multiple days to less than two hours.
Aside from my former employer, I can’t imagine many companies are still using VMS because they like it, but rather because “it’s been running on that weird old server back there that hasn’t been powered off in 15 years and nobody knows how to do anything on it”. If any company is going to take the effort to migrate to new hardware (and a version of the OS that hasn’t had years of testing) and recompile all of their applications, I have to think it would be much less effort and smarter for the long-term to migrate to a more widely supported platform.
Yeah, at a previous job we did maintenance for an old embedded system. A complete rewrite/update was in progress, but until it was finished and had feature parity we were stuck doing maintenance on VMS because it was the only platform supported by our dev tools (a Jovial compiler targeting iRMX).
It was definitely a “We’re using it because we have to” situation.
A funny story, though, a little bit before I started they had switched to a VAX emulator running on a single PC, because they couldn’t find parts for the massive real VAX sitting in the lab. Switching to the emulator cut compile times down from multiple days to less than two hours.