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

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <os6dnXHC9-hiWBzUnZ2dnUVZ_u2dnZ2d at giganews.com>,
	"Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilbert88 at comcast.net> writes:
> 
> How about because: in the beginning there was AT&T unix.  AT&T gave a 
> copy to the Computer Science Department at Berkeley!  The comp sci 
> students wrote their own versions of things and added entirely new 
> things; and then there was Berkeley Unix (BSD).

Actually, if you compare BSD to the AT&T Unixes that preceded it you
will find that they stuck pretty much to the same design philosophy.
Put files in the same places, used the same or similar names, kept
the same option sets.  it is not until AT&T came out with SYSV that
the change occurs and, as I said earlier, it was most likely because
of a desire to set themselves apart from the previous versions of
Unix when AT&T decided they wanted to play commercial Unix.  They
failed, but sadly, all the proprietary Unixes to follow choose to
emulate SYSV rather than the much more successful and widespread BSD.

> 
> For the last thirty-five or forty years these two versions and their 
> descendants have been exchanging genetic material in ways that would 
> make a stock breeder blush!

Yeah, go back and look at the infamous Unix Lawsuit.  There was more
BSD copyrighted code in AT&T Unix than vice versa.

> 
> Every vendor has to make his Unix somehow "better" than the others which 
> mean that things get rewritten and things get added.  Sometimes things 
> got fixed.  Usually something else got broken.  Unix was never 
> "designed" it just grew!

I don't agree.  there was an underlying paradigm to all of Unix.  Sadly,
many of the people playing Unix guru today have abandoned that pardigm
giving us very un-Unixlike Unix systems.

> 
>>>> 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.
> 
> You're not the only one.  But tradition is a powerful force!

Sorry, I have never had a problem with them.  They are terse and to the
point. But then I also lerned Pascal by reading Wirth's "User Manual and
Report".

> 
>>>> Also, I find English words much more intuitive and actually mostly, if
>>>> not partly, self explanatory.
> 
> Use VMS then.  I do!  I also use Solaris 8, Solaris 9, Solaris 10, and 
> Red Hat Linux.  Sometimes a task is more easily done on one of these 
> than on VMS.   Sometimes the reverse is true.
> 
> I'll continue to use the tools that get the job done with a minimum of 
> effort (and collateral damage) whatever their origin.
> 
>>> Once again, matter of opinion. And really rather Anglo-centric, don't
>>> you think?  So, then, how useful was VMS in Germany or France?
> 
> Did you ever think that perhaps there is a German version of VMS?  

None that I am aware of.  perhaps one of our German readers will jump
in here and clarify that for us.

>                                                                   One 
> that speaks to the natives in their own barbarous tongue?  I'm pretty 
> sure that there is a Japanese version of VMS that types Nihongo in kata 
> kana.  Likewise, German, French, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic. . . .  Would 
> you believe any language that there is a sufficient market for?  (There 
> are something like 7,000 known human languages, some of them spoken by 
> only a few dozen people.  It's not possible to support them all but I 
> suspect that most of the major languages are supported.  I doubt that HP 
> would support 700 languages, let alone 7,000 but I have no trouble 
> imagining a dozen or two of the major languages.

Actually, I just went to the HP Documentation site.  If you go to
OpenVMS Docs there is a table on the side with other languages listed.
If you click on any language other than English all you get is HPUX
documentation.  Looks like it's English or nothing for VMS.

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>