Microsoft Must Be Getting Desperate (V)

5-17-2016 | Orangehoof

[Edward.Fish]

>> ‘OpenVMS is being ported to the x86_64 architecture, that could shake things up in the PC market.’
>
> They are 25 years too late. It’s not just a port that makes an OS successful. BeOS/Solaris was ported too, and nobody gave a sht.

In 1992 they released VMS for the Alpha; that was before the WindowsNT kernel was ported into the mainstream consumer Windows OS. (Microsoft also had a WinNT for Alpha, though I'm unsure as to its lifecycle timeline.)

In 2003 they released VMS on the Itanium (limited eval), with a full release in 2005. (This was about when the Itanium was hyped to be the replacement CPU for x86 by Intel; it was co-developed by HP which [IIRC] had acquired VMS by then.)

And in 2015 & 2016 HP updated VMS for the "Poulson" and the HPE 9500 series Itanium processors. (Respectively.)

The port to x86_64 is a new effort, I think it started (from the proposal) 2014 or maybe 2013; they plan to have a release by 2018 and IIUC they've made some good progress so far, though admittedly still in the early stages. — and one thing you're forgetting about is VMS's reputation for security, programming (having the ability to have record-based files as part of the FS is nice), and clustering.