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

[Richard B. Gilbert]

Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> In article <006fa3e1$0$11539$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com>,
> 	JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> writes:
>> Michael Kraemer wrote:
>>
>>> Back to the point: Neither VMS Help nor Unix man pages
>>> are appropriate for learning either OS from scratch.
>>
>> Learning an OS or a language (spoken) reminds me of a jet engine when it
>> is started.  It needs external assist (compressed air, or in the case of
>> the 787, electricity) to start it spinning, and at first, it just spins
>> slowly without being productive at all.
>>
>> But once it has gone beyond a certain point, they start in inject fuel
>> and ignite it and it starts to spin at low setting on its own, no longer
>> needing external assist, and once warmed up, it can be increased to full
>> thrust for takeoff.
>>
>> You need to have a core knowledge of an OS first. How to edit files,
>> where files are located, how system startup works (which files are
>> executed etc). Once you know the basics, you can then learn the rest by
>> yourself and eventually, you learn very fast. Towards the end, you end
>> up just needing to fine tune stuff, learning tidbits over time.
> 
> You mean like the "learn" utility on early versions of Unix?  Did VMS
> ever have an equivalent?
> 

Not that I know of.  DEC Educational Services offered courses in DCL, 
System Management and, I believe, a lot of other VMS related topics.
I got the System Management courses and that was all!  At the time, I 
already knew IBM OS/360, DOS/360, IBM System/7 (not that it had much of 
an O/S) HP RTE-III and RTE-IV, SDS 900 series, and a little PDP-8.  With 
all the background picking up VMS was no big deal!  I've since learned 
several flavors of Unix, MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, W/NT, W/2000, and W/XP.
I may have forgotten one or two more.

VMS had an excellent set of documentation, a tradition that has been 
maintained for most of the last thirty years.