Re: VMS Pascal article

On 1/9/25 1:47 PM, jayjwa wrote:

Subcommandante XDelta <vlf@star.enet.dec.com> writes:
 

For years now the question has been surfacing in the OpenVMS community
"Where are the pimply faced kids?"

No one knows what it is, let alone how to use it. Thus, there is no
demand for it. How would a young guy, say 15 year's old, go about
getting his hands on it?

Maybe apply for a community license?

It's not being taught in colleges anymore and you can't
legally get it at home.

You certainly can get it at home, legally and for free.  It's true that
it isn't much used in many of the places where it used to be ubiquitous,
including colleges and universities.

The products and licenses are laughably expensive,
especially when compared to other systems like Windows, Mac, and of
course Linux. Even when there was a real hobbyist program, it was very
restrictive. Expensive software running on expensive hardware might have
worked in the 1980s, but it doesn't work now.

Exotic hardware is no longer necessary, and the software prices now are
a lot lower, adjusted for inflation, than they were 20, 30 or more years
ago.  That doesn't mean it's cheap -- most commercial software isn't.

Unfortunately, the
business model wasn't updated to today's time. That is why there's no
new community members.

Arguably it is the *new* business model, i.e., the time-limited
licenses, that make it harder for people to justify staying with VMS.

 I was speaking to a well-known member of the community a few months
back on IRC, and even he said it was far easier and much, much cheaper to set
up a new server running something other than VMS. Even VSI's web server
runs on Ubuntu if I'm not mistaken.
 

Indeed, does anybody under sixty, follow comp.os.vms?

I lurk here and IRC 2600 #vms occasionally. Now that Google Groups is
dead, the place (and usenet itself) is usable again.