[Info-vax] Whither VMS?

[Richard B. Gilbert]

Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> In article <V49+bpWWDtyc at eisner.encompasserve.org>,
> 	koehler at eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org (Bob Koehler) writes:
>> In article <7haqjjF2ssv04U1 at mid.individual.net>, billg999 at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) writes:
>>> You just won't accept that there are other ways tio us Unix than a shell,
>>> will you.  At least there has been since the TTY went away.  :-)
>>    I have, and I do, but the application's interface is not the OS
>>    interface.
>  
> So, now we are back to arguing what is OS and what is an application
> on top of the OS.  Is BASH part of the OS?  Is DCL?  I really don't
> think any "OS" has a "user" inteface.  They all have an API for which
> various user interfaces get written.  Under Unix, a "shell" is just a
> user level program.  One is not even necessary in order for the OS to
> be functional for regular users.  Kind of like menu driven captive
> accounts on VMS that offer no access to DCL for the user.
> 
> bill
> 

I think you could make a very reasonable case that DCL is part of the O/S.

1. DCL is part of system startup.
2. DCL is part of system shutdown.
3. DCL ships with the VMS binaries.

If you wanted to work at it, you could probably create a substitute or 
modify something to substitute.  Since DEC never documented the entry to 
supervisor mode or provided one (there is no CMSUPER()) you are pretty 
much on your own.

I think that TGV and a few others have managed to reverse engineer it 
but I don't think they have ever published the details of the interface.