Thursday, November 26, 2009

Dear Lazyweb: VMS to Unix edition

Dear Lazyweb,

Once upon a time, a team of guys sat down and wrote an application in C, running on VMS on a VAX.  It was a rather important undertaking and runs a reasonably important back-end operation at LargeCo.  This whole shebang works so well that twenty-five years later it's still chugging along and doing it's thing.

Time passes and people retire and it so happens that the Last Man Standing has turned over the keys to a new generation who - we might imagine - are less than thrilled to find themselves caretakers of a system old enough to be their younger brother.  Yet, as underwhelmed as they are by the idea of dealing with Ultra Legacy Systems, they can't justify the cost of replacing the venerable application.

LMS discovered that I habla unix and put this question to me.  And since I habla unix but don't speaka the C I shall summarize and put it to you.  Long Story Short:

LMS wants to port LegacyApp, written in C. from VMS to unix.  Resources?  Any books he can read?  People he can talk to?

Cross posted to Stackoverflow.


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