Re: Portents of VMS death

From: JF Mezei (jfmezei.spamnot_at_istop.com)
Date: 06/05/03 

Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2003 13:55:32 -0400

Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> No student would have enough experience with VMS after only two years
> to make any kind of a valid statement like that.

False. If a student gets a good impression of VMS during schooling, they will
mention VMS when their employer seeks solutions. How do you think Linux is
making inroads into businesses ? Because newly hired geeks mention that their
experience with Linux is positive and that they are convinced it can do the job.

> It is necessary to make it possible for VMS to be seen as a long term
> serious CS subject. Then, maybe, with a lot of work, professors can be
> convinced to incorporate it into their courses again.

Fair point. However, you have to start somewhere.

My suggestion, which I had made to Mr Marcello some time ago, is to have a
guest lecturer that teaches about clustering. The guest lecturer would be a
VMS bigot (your local VMS ambassador for instance, or Keith Parris).

Then, you provide a mini cluster for the kids to play with. 5 or 6
workstations, 2 boot servers.
They can then play with the DLM, SYSMAN etc etc.

With the "guest lectures", the students (and faculty who may attend just to
see what the guest lecturer is saying) will see how pityful their fancy unix
clusters are compared to VMS, and more importantly, the students will also
learn about the important features of a cluster for data integrity etc, learn
about issues with volume shadowing in a cluster, quorum etc. And they will see
where Unix has flaws.

Faculty gets to see that it is to their advantage to teach clustering on a VMS
based solution so that their student then come better prepared. VMS has the
clustering today that Unix will have in 5-10 years. What better way to prepare
courses/students ?

Relevant Pages

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