[Info-vax] Anyone interested in another public access system

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <49D6D457.A96B7D25 at spam.comcast.net>,
	David J Dachtera <djesys.no at spam.comcast.net> writes:
> Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>> 
>> In article <BZhjsJkqzq4v at spock.koehler.athome.net>,
>>         koehler at eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org writes:
>> > In article <72pgbbFrckbiU1 at mid.individual.net>, billg999 at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) writes:
>> >>
>> >> U*mmmm....  No, not really.  Active development (well, at least as active as
>> >> VMS seems to be) for three of the PDP-11 OSes just ended last year.  So, if
>> >> you take when they first started and compare that to when VMS first started
>> >> VMS will need a few more real good years to match them.
>> >
>> >    Hm.  Although possibly not as important as the Berkley port to VAXen,
>> >    I seem to recall the development of UNIX including a port to PDP-11
>> >    early on.
>> >
>> >    Sadly, I think continued development of that '60s technology will
>> >    continue for a bit longer.
>> 
>> Unix is no more 60's technology than VMS (which traces it's roots back
>> to RSX on the PDP-11 as I recall) or zOS which can trace it's roots all
>> the way back to the IBM 360.
>> 
>> It never ceases to amaze me that Unix, which has seen constant development
>> and considerably more attention from Computer Scientists and Engineers
>> than VMS is seen as stagnant while VMS which, as frequently stated here,
>> has seen little in the way of anything beyond the minimal bug fixing, is
>> seen as the epitome of modern computing.
> 
> Well, UN*X, at it's core, has changed relatively little since its
> inception. Sure, there have been improvements in scheduling, memory
> management, loadable kernel modules/drivers and the like, and in the IP
> stack, the shells have acquired some features they lacked which
> essentially bring them up to where VMS+DCL was 20 years ago, ...
> 
> ... but, the whole system is still spawned from a single process (init,
> PID 1) (VMS "fixed" that (sort of) over a decade ago (most processes are
> still spawned by JBC, but the resulting process trees are not owned by
> the JBC), VMS-style clustering is still non-existant, VMS-style
> "cluster" management (ala SYSMAN) is still a site-specific collection of
> cobbled-together kludges, the manpages are still terse, esoterically
> worded and about as user-unfriendly as such a feature can get and still
> exist, command names are still cryptic and non-sensical, command options
> are equally cryptic, non-sensical and disuniform for the most part (IBM
> has made some strides in their own add-ins, but zero elsewhere), the
> filesystem is still fragile and easily broken (lose a directory with no
> record of which inode number belongs to which file, and you're
> hopelessly screwed), no RMS or equivalent, no logical names, multi-path
> FC support remains a third-party add-in (example: EMC PowerPath),
> privilege is still an all-or-nothing proposition, ...
> 
> Need I go on?

No, when your measure of modern computing is whatever is VMS-style
I guess anything that isn't VMS is deficient.  So, how much longer
than Unix is VMS going to be around?  Forgetting all measures except
delivering what the custome needs and wants, which is mnore successful?

How many times do you need to be told that Unix is adaptable enough that
pretty much any of the things you mentioned could have been (and still 
could be) added except that Unix users don't see them as something to
be bothered about.

> 
> I've no way to know whether there is any hope of ever getting any new
> blood in OpenVMS engineering, but I'm hoping someone, somewhere, perhaps
> in VMS V10.0-1 will solve the "fork()" problem and in doing so solve
> many of the incompatibilities between UN*X and VMS, perhaps even merge
> UN*X and VMS into something that brings the best of both worlds to EDP. 

Personally, I don't think the fork() problem will ever be solved.  I
think there is just too much difference at a very low level to make it
possible.

bill

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>