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

[Richard B. Gilbert]

AEF wrote:
> On Jan 29, 8:59 am, billg... at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:
>> In article <d5ee8428-e6e4-4013-bad1-6846c0ca0... at o24g2000yqf.googlegroups.com>,
>>         AEF <spamsink2... at yahoo.com> writes:
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Jan 28, 12:24 pm, billg... at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:
>>>> In article <-r-dndyy7LwI6x3UnZ2dnUVZ_uedn... at giganews.com>,
>>>>         "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber... at comcast.net> writes:
>>>>> AEF wrote:
>>>>>> On Jan 28, 1:46 am, Michael Kraemer <M.Krae... at gsi.de> wrote:
>>>>>>> AEF schrieb:
>>> [...]
>>>>>                           There was only ONE case, uppercase!  I
>>>>> believe it was automagically converted to lower case and you had to
>>>>> "escape" anything you wanted left in uppercase.
>>>>> There is no reason other than tradition to continue this barbarous
>>>>> practice but tradition is a powerful force.
>>>> And, as I have repeatedly stated here, if you don't like it, one of
>>>> the strengths of Unix is you can change it.  I have used a system
>>>> that had an "MSDOS shell" that mimiced MSDOS pretty well.  I have
>>>> personally written a shell that mimiced the UCSD-Pascal menu system.
>>> Can I change it to not be case-sensitive? If your rent check bounced
>>> because it was in the wrong case, would that be okay? I think not!
>> Sure, but it's probably more work than your likely to want to do.
>> You do remember that Unix started with real teletypes when there
>> was only one case.  I can even remember a time when if you accidently
>> logged on with the caps lock on it set the terminal to map everything
>> to single case. Of course, if you hade dual-case file names you were
>> screwed.....
> 
> So how did it get changed to dual case?
> 
>>> Mimic MS-DOS? Why make things worse? MS-DOS?! Yuck.
>> This was around 1981.  MSDOS didn't have the bad reputation it has now.
>> And everyone knew it.  It was an attempt to ease MSDOS users into Unix.
>> Most of the users I knew who actually tried it ended out dumping it in
>> favor of sh or csh pretty quick.  But, as a proof of concept it worked
>> really well.
> 
> OK. Good point.
> 
>>>> Adaptability is one of Unix's greatest strengths.  Which, brings up
>>>> the question of why no one has done it?  Guess the people who actually
>>>> use Unix like it the way it is.
>>> Or it=92s not in their power to change it. Or: Those who don't use Unix
>>> use something else. So someone wasted time making Unix "adaptable" --
>>> which you claim is one of Unix's greatest strengths -- only for it to
>>> go unused. . . . OK.
>> That's ridiculous.  How many shells are there for Unix now?  How many
>> did it start with? Why did so many people write new shells?  Why has
>> no one ever written one that looked like VMS?
> 
> Bill, make up your mind: People like it the way it is/was or they
> write/wrote new shells?
> 
>>>>>> Well, I'd think the photographic terms, as they currently exist, are
>>>>>> more intuitive, right?
>>>>>> 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.
>>>>> A unix user need not concern himself with the underlying storage media!
>>>>> VMS users are accustomed to seeing physical devices, each with its own
>>>>> filesystem.
>>> A VMS user can be set up so that he not be concerned with device
>>> names. And even without that, he can use the disk logical names
>>> instead of physical device names.
>> And?
> 
> I thought the point was that in Unix a user is not aware and doesn't
> need to be aware of the underlying device names. I was just saying
> that while out-of-the-box VMS does make the user aware of device
> names, the sysmgr can set up an environment in which the user uses
> logical names which are updated as needed by the sysmgr. (And
> somewhere I made the point that, even out-of-the-box, a user could
> simply use disk logical names (DISK$volume_name, or locally made LNMs)
> to insulate himself from reconfiguration of the physical devices.
> 
> [...]
> 
Joe User need not necessarily be aware that there are devices!  He gets 
a default disk device, prints to a default printer, output and error 
messages go to his terminal, etc.  At one point I had something like 300 
users who were captive.  They knew how to log on, how to use the 
application and where to find their printed output and that was all they 
knew or needed to know.

Users MAY know a lot about the system, its capabilities and how to make 
use of them but that's not necessarily so in all or even in most cases!