vacuum_tuber's Journal: Slashdot once again displays incredible stupidity

Slashdot once again displays incredible stupidity
23 Jul 08 2143 hours

This is not a submission; it is a comment on the utter cluelessness and stupidity displayed by Slashdot in rejecting my submission about the Getronics Wang VS End of Support announcement release Monday morning.

My second submission (the first was incomplete due to hitting "Submit" instead of "Preview" due to the positioning of the buttons after the first preview) was perfect, links verified, well-written, and I am the leading authority on the subject on the whole planet.

A key point of interest is that the New VS that continues on after end of life for the legacy systems takes the Wang VS mainframe into LINUX, repeat LINUX. We who work closely with the virtual New VS are both VS and Linux people. All the customers who move to the New VS end up running Linux in commercial production, often as the enterprise system running the whole business.

Another point of interest, possibly going over your heads due to your young ages, is that Wang brought the world affordable calculators, word processing, affordable business data processing, the first optical document imaging, the first PBX/DP integration, and for 31 years offered the most efficient, easiest to program, easiest to operate and easiest to use mainframe-class systems. Throughout the 31 years and something like 16 generations of VS processor, Wang maintained binary compatibility, something IBM never did. Wang manufactured about 65,000 of its 1970s 2200 small business systems and about 65,000 of its VS mainframes. The high water mark of the VS installed base was probably around 30,000 systems. Literally millions of people over the age of 25 have had their hands on Wang keyboards. Just ask around.

Wang was one of the last great U.S. R&D shops, one of the last to design and build CPUs and the OSs to go with them.

The passing of the VS from support after 31 years is a momentous event, and one with Linux implications as the New VS that replaces it runs exclusively on Linux platforms. There are perhaps 1,000 to 2,000 live, living, production legacy VS systems still in operation in the world. Most are in multi-technology sites running a variety of systems often covered in news on Slasdot. Many people currently working in IT are affected by this.

In the time since I submitted this you have published a number of interesting and also a number of thoroughly trivial articles. I don't know why you sat on this until it became stale, nor why you rejected it, but I have to conclude that the many evidences of sloppiness and cluelessness visible daily on Slashdot are hereby confirmed.

In the past I have been a slashdot subscriber but I doubt I will ever send you morons another dime.