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

[JF Mezei]

I am surprised that POSIX is still being discussed.

I tried POSIX once on a 3100 VAX back in the 1990s.

POSIX wasn't VMS compatibility with UNIX, it was an application that ran
on VMS and gave you a unix shell/prompt and Unix style filenames. And it
was slow as molasses.

Compare this with Cygwin which provides a fair amount of Unix
compatibility on Windows and works and is deployed widely.

The current path that had been undertaken by the new england engineering
 of VMS was to give native VMS some unix compatible tools, and fork() is
perhaps the hardest to achieve.

The fact that engineers were able to port GTK, and Mozilla/Seamonkey to
VMS does show a fair degree of unix compatibility, although building it
on VMS requires a lot of work and middleware (PHP etc etc ).

If VMS came with all the tools that allowed even *moi* to build
Seamonkey as easily as on a Unix system, I think that would be a great
accomplishement.

A an aside, I was able to build imagemagick on VMS, and the build
procedure failed on OS-X because of a missing utility !!!!! (can't
remember which one but it was some type of unzip).