[Info-vax] Whither VMS?

[John Wallace]

Steve Thompson wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Sep 2009, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>
> > Actually, it was Eunice.  I still have a ditro tape.  I just wish there
> > was some way to get a license to run it.
>
> I ran Eunice for some time. Believe me, if you can't get a license to run
> it, count yourself lucky.
>
> Steve

I'll second that aversion to Eunice.

Back in 1985, I was working on a project where there were multiple
development platforms and multiple target platforms. The targets were
VMS and an embedded OS, but the development boxes were a mix of low
end VAX, early 68000 boxes running UNIX (System V), IBM PC/XT (?)
running Venturcom Venix UNIX (UNIX V7?), and big(ger) Gould/SEL UNIX
boxes (which were in the US whereas I was in the UK) which ran UTX-32,
a System V/BSD hybrid. The VMS boxes had Eunice (a somewhat dated BSD
derivative) available, but due to its unbelievably appalling
performance it really didn't make sense to use it in that environment.

This was back in the days when the C routine for opening a file took
two parameters on System V and three on BSD. Or was it the other way
round. UNIX? Portable? Not then it wasn't.

In the UK end of this outfit, the most productive software development
platform was the VAX/VMS one (on a 725, for goodness sake), especially
after the screen oriented debugger in V4. And the most productive
documentation development platform was also VMS, even though *roff was
the project's documentation standard of choice (edit on VMS with a
decent editor, automagically translate the majority of the *roff to
RUNOFF and see how it looks, and when it's close to right, uucp the
source to the horribly restricted horribly unreliable SysV box to feed
it through the real *roff to produce a version for review).

But productivity is rarely quantifiable in a way that matters to
purchasing departments and PHBs,whereas performance and in particular
price/performance make good publicity and and attract interest.

The result is that every corporate desktop now has a "personal
productivity tool", many (most?) of which are entirely inappropriate
for the jobs they are doing.