Re: How long till....
"If they do, and then a fully-formed DEC can be spat out of that ... I'll be one of the happiest men alive..."
That may seem like an almost infinitely improbable idea, but then two years ago so would the idea that HP would repeal the death sentence on VMS and instead hand over its future development to a new company who would (a) promptly recruit many former members of the VMS community at DEC (b) commit to a port of VMS to x86-64... and then it happened:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/31/openvms_spared/
They've now built+released their first new Field Test of VMS (for those IA64 things, in the short term).
The current commercial arrangements of the PDP11 stuff are less clear, but a Colorado company called xx2247 appears to have some involvement. LinkedIn has contact info.
Yes there was other stuff too, but I know even less about the pre-PDP era.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
