beaulieu@gca.UUCP (Larry Beaulieu) (06/01/90)
I heard a nasty rumor today floating around that after the next major release from Autotrol, scheduled for next year, VMS will no longer be a supported platform. Does anyone know if this is for real? Not that I'd be sorry to see us migrate our CAD envrionment to Sparc/DECstations, but no migration is ever fun. -- Larry Beaulieu The usual disclaimers apply. GCA/Ultratech Corporation, Andover, MA beaulieu@gca.com (or ...uunet!gca!beaulieu, if you prefer)
garhow@auto-trol.UUCP (Garry Howard) (06/11/90)
This is in response to a posting discussing a rumor that Auto-trol plans to drop
support for VMS. At our user's group meeting held here in Denver last month the
following announcement was made by the Vice President of R&D:
"We have adopted Unix as our strategic future operating system direction for all
environments ... We are porting the full family of products to the DEC Ultrix
workstations. We have announced a July availability for our Series 7000 Mechanical
Design Software, and athe rest of the product line will follow over the next two to
three quarters. This is our strategic direction for workstations from DEC.
VMS is not strategic. We will be phasing out Auto-trol support of the VMS environment
over time. The details and timing are not yet determined and are governed by economics
and by the requirement that we have a sensible migration path for our current VMS
based customers."
We made the announcement at this time to give our VMS based customers early warning
of our intentions to allow them to properly plan for migration. There are no firm plans
for how many future releases of specific Auto-trol products will be done under VMS.
Garry Howard
Sr. Project Manager
Research and Development
Auto-trol Technology Corporation
Denver, Colorado
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Garry Howard garhow@auto-trol.COM
{...}ncar!ico!auto-trol!garhow
Auto-trol Technology 12500 N Washington Denver, Co. 80241-2404 (303)252-2332ereiamjh@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Tom B. O'Toole) (06/13/90)
In article <1208@auto-trol.UUCP> garhow@auto-trol.COM () writes: >"We have adopted Unix as our strategic future operating system direction for all Neet "strategy" d00d! Well, I for one am glad that I don't use and in fact have never heard of your product, because I for one am sick of having Unix shoved up my ass by vendors. Blah blah blah unix is so great blah blah blah here is is blah blah too bad... Don't get me wrong, I use unix every day, and I think it's got good and bad points, but it's not the ONLY thing for EVERYTHING as all these vendors desperately trying to be on the inside of the next windshift would have us think. But it is the vendors that are taking away the CHOICE from the usersLEAPING on (whoops, damn vi)...hh I hope DEC hurries up and makes VMS portable, because it's the only way it can survive with THESE kinds of market forces. Or somebody come up with a new OS from scratch (no, I don't mean like OS2!). It seems we are always hearing about the latest unix related marketing press release from the investment banker OS kernel hacker-gurus who read tea leaves for the computer press, and most of the time, I couldn't care less... -- Tom O'Toole - ecf_stbo@jhuvms.bitnet "Internet is the wide area network JHUVMS system programmer protocol packaged with TCP/IP that unix systems Homewood Computing Facilities rely on to communicate remotely with each other" Johns Hopkins University, Balto. Md. 21218 -Digital Review
abstine@image.soe.clarkson.edu (Arthur Stine) (06/13/90)
From article <5516@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU>, by ereiamjh@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Tom B. O'Toole): > In article <1208@auto-trol.UUCP> garhow@auto-trol.COM () writes: >>"We have adopted Unix as our strategic future operating system direction for all > Neet "strategy" d00d! > Well, I for one am glad that I don't use and in fact have never heard of > your product, because I for one am sick of having Unix shoved up my ass by > vendors. Blah blah blah unix is so great blah blah blah here is is blah blah > too bad... Well, for this company, it may very well be the 'right' direction. The sheer economics of supporting multiple, very different, platforms may no longer be feasible for them. And lets face it, VMS is probably not going to be a major player in the desktop engineering workstation market. Too expensive, too little performance/$$, etc. It is just sheer economics for these companies. They also kinda have to go in the direction that their customers are going too. And alot of companies are moving to Un*x in some form for engineering workstations. I use Un*x alot too, but I also have a VAXstation running VMS. I like both, but if I had to cough up the $$ to buy a workstation, I'd probably have to get a Un*x one because thats where the performance is. How long will it be before DEC gets a VMS workstation to around 18-20 VUPS? And how much will it cost? Probably won't be competetive with the DS5000 or the RS/6000... -- Art Stine Sr Network Engineer Clarkson U ABStine@CLVMS.Clarkson.Edu
garhow@auto-trol.UUCP (Garry Howard) (06/14/90)
I should have realized that many of the people reading my message on the
network are not familiar with Auto-trol and I should have given some
background.
Auto-trol is a CAD/CAM systems vendor. We develop CAD/CAM software solutions
targeted toward Mechanical Design / Manufacturing, Architectural, Process
Plant Design, Facilities Layout, Technical Illustration, and Technical
Information Management markets. We provide integrated systems configured
from industry standard hardware coupled with our graphics software. We
currently support Sun, HP/Apollo, and DEC (VMS and Ultrix) workstations.
Workstations, and the distributed computing model, are ideal for our products
and our engineering users.
Our software is very compute intensive and graphics oriented. We are very
demanding of the hardware and need the performance offered by the new
generations of RISC based workstations in order to provide the kind of
interactive performance our customers expect. All the RISC machines
currently on the market, and available in the near future, run UNIX.
Supporting multiple hardware platforms is expensive. The decision to port to
a new machine is an economic one based on the revenue that can be generated
offsetting the support cost. The current trend toward industry standards
reduces the cost but does not eliminate it. The more similar the operating
system environments are on the different hardware platforms the easier it
is to port. Although there are different flavors of UNIX and they are not
100% compatible they are more similar than UNIX and VMS. This makes VMS more
expensive to support than another UNIX environment. Auto-trol has been a
long time supporter of VMS. In fact we were the first CAD/CAM vendor to
ship a 32 bit CAD/CAM system on the VAX hardware.
With the introduction of their ULTRIX based RISC workstations DEC has given
their customers a choice. There are markets for both VMS and ULTRIX based
DEC workstations. For our kinds of engineering CAD/CAM applications the ULTRIX
box appears to be the machine of choice. VMS workstations are more suitable
to business and non-graphic oriented applications. Our decision to support
the ULTRIX machine is consistent with DEC's product direction for desktop
engineering workstations. Our announcement has been well received by our
installed VMS customers. Most of them are receptive, and many are even
enthusiastic, about moving to ULTRIX workstations. In most cases they will
coexist with VMS.
In summary, we are not trying to "force" UNIX on anyone. We don't create
industry trends, we are driven by them the same as everyone else. We deliver
products in the environments that the marketplace dictates. The issue is
not whether VMS is better or worse than UNIX but whether it is economically
feasible to suppport it with our product set.
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Garry Howard garhow@auto-trol.COM
{...}ncar!ico!auto-trol!garhow
Auto-trol Technology 12500 N Washington Denver, Co. 80241-2404 (303)252-2332kassover@minerva.crd.ge.com (David Kassover) (06/14/90)
In article <1227@auto-trol.UUCP> garhow@auto-trol.COM () writes: ... [explanation of decision not to support VMS deleted] > >In summary, we are not trying to "force" UNIX on anyone. We don't create >industry trends, we are driven by them the same as everyone else. We deliver >products in the environments that the marketplace dictates. The issue is >not whether VMS is better or worse than UNIX but whether it is economically >feasible to suppport it with our product set. Well said. I have no affiliation with Auto-trol Technology of any sort, nor, to the best of my knowledge, have I used it's products. But I dare say that users of those products for the purposes for which they are intended (and maybe others) really don't care what operating system, if any, runs in the box(es) attached to their output device. If such users need to have access to VMS, or Unix, such service can be provided much more effectively through a different set of boxes. On the other hand, I don't have to put up the money to buy Auto-trol boxes when I already have some perfectly good VMS boxes. -- David Kassover "Proper technique helps protect you against kassover@ra.crd.ge.com sharp weapons and dull judges." kassover@crd.ge.com F. Collins