[Info-vax] OT: Rob Short: Operating System Evolution

[JF Mezei]

Neil Rieck wrote:
>
> You are correct about people looking upon technology as a religion. I
> was once a huge fan of the Apple religion until I watched Apple make a
> series of product changes which proved to me that Apple management was
> less involved in the Apple religion than their customers 

I would agree with that. Apple simply fosters te religion and then takes
advantage of the loyalty of its customer base. God (Steve Jobs) rarely
touches the customers.

However, the Apple religion is about being different, and better quality
than the other religion.

The Windows religion is about comforming with the rest of the world, it
is about not being different and doing the same stuff as everyone else.

You don't see Windows missionaries pushing that Windows is better. Their
only argument is that it is "compatible" because everyone uses it.

The Windows religion is also not as strong. There is much less
convinction in it than in the Apple religion. Windows followers just
blindly buy Windows because tey feel it is the only option.


> It is easy to see why people might get involved in the VAX or VMS
> religion since these platforms were so damned reliable. Both DEC and
> Compaq knew it so kept the prices high.

In the 1980s, when the VMS religion grew strong, ut was quite similar to
Apple: be different and choose something than it better than IBM. We al
cheered seeing the little guy (Digital) beat the giant. Little did we
know that Digital became a giant.

The part about cheering about VMS winnning is gone now. I think the last
couple years removed any hope that HP would let VMS fight for new business.

All that is left now is the pride in VMS being a high quality system
that was well thought out back in the 1980s.

> But like VMS based
> products, Macs are more expensive that their Windows counter parts
> (and here I am talking about Intel based Macs with Core i7 processors)

The "more expensive" portion falls apart when you customize the PC to
have the same features as the Mac. PCs have a much lower entry price,
but when you load them up with the same features as the Mac, the price
gets very close (if not higher).

But yeah, there is an "Apple tax".  Just like you pay for the tiger icon
in front of a jaguar, you pay for the lighted Apple logo on the laptop.


> 1) DEC screwed up big-time by chasing some of their Seattle employees
> into the waiting arms of Bill gates

DEC screwed up big time. Period. End of story.


> 2) ex-DEC employees at Microsoft did, to the PC industry, what DEC did
> to the minicomputer industry (made it respectable).

There is a major difference between Microsoft and DEC. Microsoft is a
marketing driven company with marketing dictating what features need to
be added. Digital, having no marketing, was more driven by the needs of
customers and by ideas from its engineers.

Note that Apple is also a marketing driven company. Having transparent
menu backgrounds (especially with the "Dock") is absolutely annoying.
But it made for a great deal of "Ohhh, Wow ! from the audience when
Steve Jobs presented this tehnology a few years back.  And there isn't a
way to turn it off.


> 4) the changes forced upon Intel by the ex-DEC employees at Microsoft
> probably helped to make Intel the juggernaut it is today.

No. It prevented Microsoft from going down fast because its softare was
so instable that people started to migrate to the Mac fast. Remember
that between Windows 95 and Windows XP was a slew of other releases that
were lackluster.

And it appears that XP is to Windows what 5.5-2 was to VMS. The one
stabel release people stay on.


> it. The Vista fiasco was supposedly caused by a combination of lax
> management (no more Bill Gates) along with the retirement of ex-DEC
> employees (they actually had to bring Dave Cutler back from retirement
> to move a few things along).

I think XP was the exception at Microsoft. It was forced to make
something that worked. (in fact, the virus prooblem had gootten so out
of hand that Microsoft had to issues a "SP" (patch) which turned XP
respectable and closed all the opened ports that made it so easy to
infect a Windows computer.

Vista was back at the "marketing" force, except that it failed because
they added so many new features that Vista didnt run on existing PCs.

This is where Apple is pretty good: adding features that don't weigh
down the system too much. It is a shame that many of those features are
only worth anything during the keynote address to impress the audience
and have no value during day to day use. But many features do have a lot
of value.


> Will I ever trade in an OpenVMS system for a Windows system? Not
> anytime soon, 

I am in the process of moving to OS-X. Quite a learning process. It is
still too early for me to fairly compare both because I have yet to
learn a lot more on OS-X to be at the same level of confort as I am with
VMS. Just because things are different doesn't mean they aren't as good.

But in terms of security, I certaintly don't feel comfortable with OS-X.
It lacks proper intrusion system (one that doesn't disable accounts
permanently). It also lacks OPCOM. A real little jewell for VMS. There
may be one syslog on OS-X, but there are different log files.  Some
errors for Apache (such as if it finds a syntax error in a config file)
go to the main system log, but the rest goes to the Apache log.

There are management tools which are very neat for the Xserve. But they
need a little extra touch to make them really trustable. For instance,
the GUY System Admin tool should have a button in the DSN tab to "don't
screw with my zone files". By default, it takes the info you enter n the
gui to create/update zone files. It has itw onw store of information
used for the GUI and from that, it generates the zone files for Bind9.
This is neat for a newbie who doesn't know what Bind/DNS is, but a pain
for a more experienced system manager who isporting existing zone files
to OS-X.

I often fell they should hire someone like Hoff to put some VMS stuff
into the Xserve version of OS-X.