And what would DEC have been able to run this new VMS on? The nice thing about the series of Windowen is that they were to some extent backwards compatible with previous hardware, AND they were big enough to get new peripherals designed to them that could often be slipped into the old hardware.
Linux, by trying very hard with thousands of volunteers, has been able to embrace most of the hardware that Windows does. That’s the spot VMS would have been in, except without the volunteers.
There were factions in VMS that wanted to port it to x86 as long ago as 1995, maybe even earlier. Was that part of Dave’s vision? I don’t know.
I was involved with the port of VMS to ia64 (itanium).
With ia64 probably going away, the rumor is that VMS will be ported to x86. About 15 years too late.
Of course, there are technological obstacles to overcome; compilers, linkers, and loaders being the first. Then there is the port of applications using the new compilers and linkers.
It’s a huge effort. So I don’t know if it will actually happen.
The target back in that day was RISC architectures. The days of CISC architectures was drawing to a close - and we can now say that CISC effectively lost the architecture race.
I’ll see just how many people tell me otherwise before I educate them as to why this is.