[Info-vax] "Shanghai Stock Exchange" and OpenVMS

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <b9489278-4168-437b-85e5-fff095da5d09 at l38g2000vba.googlegroups.com>,
	AEF <spamsink2001 at yahoo.com> writes:
> On Jan 28, 1:46 am, Michael Kraemer <M.Krae... at gsi.de> wrote:
>> AEF schrieb:
>>
>> > New! From IDG books: DOS for Dummkopfs.
>>
>> That should be "Dummköpfe", but Umlauts are not everybody's
>> strong points.
> That's what it is in English. I even checked at www.webster.com. Do
> you expect me to write "Deutschland" instead of "Germany"? "Republique
> francaise" instead of "France"?
>> Back to the point: Neither VMS Help nor Unix man pages
>> are appropriate for learning either OS from scratch.
> The VMS User's manual is.
>> They are meant as a reminder for forgotten keywords and such.
>> If you have no clue about those OS, both help systems
>> are next to useless.
>> I had to work on VMS before I knew Unix and found
>> VMS, its filesystem and its HELP less intuitive.
>> So Unix was a progress.
> I find the man pages dense and visually difficult to read (an example
> of poor typography). 

As I have said in the past, (and aparently at least Michael agrees) it's
all a matter of opinion as I find quite the opposite.

>                       And the ones I have usually show several versions
> of the same command with the differences specified in the name of the
> command via different paths. You know: path1/cp, path2/cp, etc., where
> path1 and path2 may be very similar in appearance. Which one is the
> one I will be running if I just specify cp? (This is intuitive?)

It is to people who use Unix for a living.  And, apparently college
freshman.

> Someone at work showed me a website which reformmated the man pages
> into something much easier to read. Can't be just me who finds the
> original man pages visually difficult to read.
> Also, I find English words much more intuitive and actually mostly, if
> not partly, self explanatory. 

Once again, matter of opinion. And really rather Anglo-centric, don't
you think?  So, then, how useful was VMS in Germany or France?

>                               I don't find that to be the case for 1-
> and 2-letter commands and options. VMS commands and qualifiers and
> keywords and such are mostly self-evident as to what they more or less
> do or specify, aside from the fine details.

Nothing about computers is "self-evident".  It's a business with its own
jargon and terminology.  I mean, why do those doctors use words like
"apendicitis" and "carcinoma"?  Why don't they just use English like
everyone else?

> VMS terms are like those in photography: What does the enlarger do? It
> enlarges (the image)! What does the developer do? It develops film or
> photographic paper. What does the focusing knob do? What does the stop
> bath do? It stops the developer from developing. The fixer bath
> "fixes" the film or print so that you can turn on the light without
> destroying the image. And then there's the print washer and the print
> dryer. Can you guess what they do?

And let's not forget the F-stop!  :-)  yeah, that's real self-evident.

>                                     Now suppose they were instead named
> by Unix type abbreviations. You'd have no or little idea what any of
> them are or do without looking them up. 

And if I were a professional photographer, I would have done that in the
process of becoming a professional photographer.  What's your point?

>                                          Now, admittedly, the existing
> photographic terms aren't fully self-explanatory, but at least you get
> a pretty good idea of what they do (well, to varying degrees). OK,
> "lens" isn't self-explanatory at all; you have to learn that one! And
> "focusing" may be a challenge for some.
> Well, I'd think the photographic terms, as they currently exist, are
> more intuitive, right?

Those of us who are not into photography would tend to disagree.  :-)
I have a number of cameras.  I used to develop my own pictures and
even used a lot of experimental high-speed film back inthe old days.
(I did a lot of sport photography.)  But I have never been as interested
in it as, say, my brother.  As a result, most of my cameras now languish
on the shelf while I do what photo taking I do with a $100 Kodak digital
I got on sale at the PX.  

> The file systems are another story. I haven't learned how you can have
> different disks in the same single file system. As a user I suppose
> that's fine, but in VMS the system manager can set up logical names to
> reference directories so that the user (or even the programmer in many
> cases) need not be concerned with what the underlying device is.
> Being intuitive is not the end-all be-all. What can you do with the OS
> is also important. Of course we _were_ discussing looking stuff up,
> but you referred to "progress", which opens up a whole new can of
> worms.

Yeah, Unix is still "progressing" and VMS is languishing in the a corner
somewhere waiting for HP to finally pull the plug on the life support
system.

> Some things in Unix I find very cool, like using output of one program
> as input for another. But VMS has some very cool things, too.
>> And, since you mentioned physics labs a few posts ago:
>> in these facilities one usually has a local primer
>> for newbies. Anyway one will need only a very small
>> subset of an OSs capabilities to do physics work.
> It's only reasonable anywhere a user starts work to have a local
> source of how to get started, be it a tutorial session; a newbie
> manual, "local guide" (Latex style name), a primer, or whatever you
> want to call it; or something else. And that's true more generally:

We used to do that, but found it unnecessary more than a decade ago.

> When you start a job, someone shows you around, right? And show's you
> the ropes, so to speak, right? And what you're expected to do, right?

Not anytime lately.  I am a professional and when I am hired it is
expected that I will walk up to my desk and begin functioning right
away.  That's what separates the professional from the intern.

I have been doing this professionally for over 30 years.  I have had
to learn new langauages, new OSes and new architectures.  No one has
ever offered to hold my hand.  I have been given tasks and, as a
professional, I have been expected to accomplish them.  And, at least
up to this point, I have been very successful at doing that, which
is probably why I have never had to worry about being unemployed.

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>