Re: Regarding the ULTRIX and OSF1 compats

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Sat, 16 Mar 2019 13:37:10 +0100
    From:        Michael Kronsteiner <alphamike%gmx.at@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <d53baca6945ad66937f288615da5ccf8eeefd48f.camel%gmx.at@localhost>

  | i see. would YOU run software that costs maybe 4-digit numbers for
  | yearly license on an OS that "maybe" runs it "somehow" ?

I have done it, yes, back when I was at the University of Melbourne.
Except that it didn't "maybe" run it "somehow", it ran it well.

For my purposes, even better than the original system, as I had
sources for NetBSD and could fix anything which was a problem (in
supporting the commercial code - which was some hardware design stuff
that the engineers used to help design hardware).

For all I know, that might still be in use (though probably not,
hardware design methods have changed a lot in the past couple of
decades, and the tools from back then most likely are of no use
any more ... but who knows...)

  | why do you think prices for those old machines have skyrocketed?
  | they run NATIVE. because it WORKS (tm)

Actually, in many cases, they do that because if they're running
something they're paying for they have someone to blame any time
something does not work.   "It isn't my fault - this software just
has bugs the vendor is not fixing..."

  | And "newer" Hardware is quite relative to stay polite. theres no newer
  | alpha or vax or decstation than the existing models. not even all of
  | them are fully supported(just check the webpages port-pmax, port-vax,
  | port-alpha).

No, I agree, those systems, which were special case designed, and had
no second source of any kind tend to eventually simply die out, and
emulators aside, eventually no-one will be running any of that code.

  | for the time being - if i need an ultrix or osf(dec unix, tru64...)
  | setup, i will install exactly that.

That's fine, for you, and no-one (here anyway) is going to limit
your ability to do that in any way at all.   But that you have no
need for some function doesn't mean that no-one else does.

kre