Although the initial implementation of VMS on the Alpha RISC is to be straight VMS 5.4 as supported on the current VAX machines, Digital Equipment Corp’s plans for a portable implementation of VMS that can be licensed to other vendors is progressing, says Systems & Network Integration. The paper reports that Portable VMS is being built on the Mach-3 kernel from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Some observers believe that if DEC prices it cheaply enough, Portable VMS could give Unix a serious run for its money, describing it as more powerful and more full-featured. But despite DEC’s claims that it is in process of turning itself from a hardware company into a software company, there are doubts that major players would want to be dependent on the company for their operating software, and DEC would face in spades the problems AT&T Co ran into over Unix, which led to the creation of quasi-independent Unix System Labs.
