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

[Alan Winston - SSRL Central Computing]

In article <74c6h5F13742pU2 at mid.individual.net>, billg999 at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) writes:
>In article <9Iqdnf8RcM-4JH3UnZ2dnUVZ_iydnZ2d at giganews.com>,
>	"Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilbert88 at comcast.net> writes:
>That is probably because at its best VMS was never more than minimaly
>POSIX compliant.

(1) It was compliant enough to get Posix certification when some "real' 
Unixes didn't have it.  The point of doing that was to be able to compete
for contracts that required Posix certification.  However, somehow Windows
was allowed as an alternative to Posix-certified systems on the DOD contracts
that required it.

As it turned  out, the market didn't actually care about Posix certification,
and it didn't actually care about the OSF standard.  Digital bet a lot on the
idea that following those standards was the way to go, and spent time and 
money on the Posix-certified VMS subsystem and on developing OSF/1 (which 
became Digital Unix which became Tru-64 Unix, and which they sent mixed
signals about to their MIPS customers until they pissed them all  off enough
to go away).  These failures weren't technical failures - they were mis-set
goals.

POSIX wasn't supposed to specify everything an operating system was.  It was
supposed to be something customers could spec that provided a level playing
field for vendors.  OSF/1 was supposed to be an alternative to Sun/AT&T having
an unfair advantage over the Unix standard (which proved pretty moot in the
long run).

(2) Posix only offered one shell, last I looked.  For the purpose of porting
Unix software, the Unix portability effort of the last five years or so, which
includes a lot of compatibility changes to the C runtime (and DECC$x logicals
to control the behavior), and the GNV projects's BASH shell, have been a lot
more effective than Posix was.

But the VMS Posix effort wasn't 'minimally compliant'; it was fully certified.
It just turned out that nobody cared.

-- Alan