Talk:Charon (software)

Commercial article?
This article appears to be a promotion of a commercial product. Notably, the most recent edits were made by employees of the vendor or from IP addresses assigned to the vendor.

Is this permissible? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.186.90.238 (talk) 21:39, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Found a reference to our CHARON research and development.
As the founder of Software Resources International (later named Stromasys), I worked for DEC at their HQ in Geneva from 1979 until the Compaq 'Merger', where I was responsible for DEC's European External Research Program, that set up joint projects with European Universities. After the 'Iron curtain' disappeared DEC became very interested in the PDP11 and VAX clone industry in Eastern Europe. These systems were also used for University education and we found many graduates with profound VMS knowledge. To use their skills, I established in 1993 the DEC Moscow software development center, staffed entirely with University graduates. In parallel I set up VMS training centers in 4 Universities: Mephi, MGU,Moscow Aviation institute and Phystech, with DEC supplying equipment out of its huge 'excess inventory' pool in Europe.

We worked on large software projects for DEC's western European customers. No problem to get excellent people, the young graduates loved the paid travel to western Europe for delivery. As many of our staff came out of a former Russian super computing project (emulating a CRAY-1 on the BESM6) they got interested in DEC's PDP-11 emulator for VMS. They found the design bad (NIH) and one of the guys wrote a PDP11 hardware emulator for Windows. I showed it to corporate engineering, but they were not interested.

When Compaq took DEC over in 1998, they had no interest in our offshore Moscow center, and I did not have a job with them. In a buyout, I took over the Moscow center, equipment, about 15 engineers and all ongoing projects. Sales was handled by my new company in Geneva,founded in December 1998. Initially the ongoing projects funded the company, but a new customer that requested a code migration was an ideal candidate for a PDP11 emulator. We dug up our PDP11 emulator, configured it for their specific use, and they bought 26 licenses. At that point we made product presentations and brochures, an the business took off. The interest in emulation projects grew rapidly. In March 1980 we had this first working microVAX emulator, over time we added general periphereal and QBUS interface support. After some discussion, Compaq created official VMS licenses for our emulator. In 2003 we built the first Alpha emulator, a DECsystem 500(?), running on the new 64 bit Windows.

Robert Boers. Elco0311 (talk) 08:27, 2 April 2023 (UTC)