[Info-vax] Dave Cutler, Prism, DEC, Microsoft, etc.

[Bob Koehler]

In article <4af6c9fc$0$273$14726298 at news.sunsite.dk>, =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?= <arne at vajhoej.dk> writes:
> 
> And my understanding is that VMS inherited this from
> the PDP-11 OS's.

   DEC OS's for PDP-11 tended to be written in Macro-11.  A little bit
   of BLISS-11 alter on was used for portable stuff like EDT.  VMS
   was initially mostly Macro-32 and BLISS; much of the Macro-32
   was eventually replaced.  Lots of other languages were also used.
 
> And when it was decided for them, then C was not available
> (at least according to many C was invented to port Unix
> to PDP-11).

   UNIX was ported to PDP-11, using C, about a decade before VMS
   was started.  So DEC could have written a C compiler for VAX and 
   large parts of VMS in C if they'd wanted to.  DEC didn't write a 
   C compiler for VAX early on because no one outside of a few UNIX 
   users were using C.  UNIX was the broken down OS that AT&T couldn't 
   find customers for.  The handwriting on the wall showed that there 
   was clearly no future for C and/or UNIX.

   Then AT&T let some kids at Berkley have a copy of the UNIX source. 
   They ran it on PDP-11, ported it to VAX, added virtual memory, added 
   TCP/IP, and somehow got others interested in it.  Start up vendors 
   like Sun and Apollo found they could throw together some commodity
   hardware, toss BSD UNIX on it much faster than they could write their
   own OS, and sell workstations.  When the vendors switched to RISC
   they blew away the performance of VAXen and people grudgingly learned
   to survive using an OS with a late 1960's human interface, writing
   code in a Frankenstein language that escaped from the lab, on hardware 
   that could grind numbers fast and cheap.