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

[Arne Vajhøj]

Bob Koehler wrote:
> 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.

So they did inherit Macro and Bliss from PDP-11.

 >                                                                VMS
>    was initially mostly Macro-32 and BLISS; much of the Macro-32
>    was eventually replaced.

Really.

It was my impression that practically nothing were replaced just
new stuff added in other languages.

>                             Lots of other languages were also used.

The old story say that there was a tiny part of VMS written in each
language to keep the RTL's mandatory in VMS itself.

I believe the story has been rejected by people that should know.

>> 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.

Half a decade.

>                   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.

DEC did write C compilers. VAX C 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 if I remember
correctly.

Absolutely horrible compilers - way below normal DEC compiler
standards. But they did exist.

>    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.

Maybe not quite accurate, but very funny.

Arne