Alfredo quited someone:
> > Unfortunately if HP devoted their
> > resources to MPE and the HP3000, they would find themselves being eased
> > out of existence very much in the same way as Prime, Data General, Wang,
> > et. al.  Even Dec doesn't believe that their strategy should solely be
> > their proprietary OS.
 
Just thought I would point out a couple of interesting items in (I think it was)
last week's Computerworld.
 
First was an article about the lack of recent upgrades to the AS/400 operating
system.  It seems IBM has spent the last two years converting the system from
the old proprietary AS/400 architecture to the new RS6000/PowerPC RISC chip,
which has eaten up all their resources.  So the AS/400 world is now in exactly
the same place the HP3000 world was *ten years ago*. The new AS/400s will all
be RISC based systems, just as the HP3000 was converted to PA-RISC a decade
ago.
 
The other article was about the recent VMS users group meeting.  They described
last year's meeting as a wake.  Everyone thought VMS/Open VMS was nearly
dead. Now this year things have turned around completely. DEC has come out with
a new version of Open VMS (version 7.0) which is 64bit, and has good
integration with Windows NT.
 
In today's Computerworld there is an interesting bound-in section entitled:
"The RECENTRALIZATION of IT".  It seems that what goes around comes around.
Big organizations are moving away from decentralization and back to central
control and management of their IT resources.
 
G.