[Info-vax] Whither VMS?

[Bob Eager]

On Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:25:11 +0000, Robin Fairbairns wrote:

> multics was another interesting system, hampered far more than vms by
> being based on a special design of hardware.  (i don't actually know of
> any port of multics to a different architecture; when i re-read
> organick's book a little while back, i was amazed that they achieved
> anything as a multi-user service on such limited hardware.)

*some* of the Multics features (e.g. the mapping of files into virtual 
memory as the only method of access, thus unifying paging and I/O) were 
incorporated into EMAS, developed at Edinburgh. That worked on anything 
with a decent page size; started off on ICL System 4 (?) and was ported 
to the ICL 2900. Also on the Amdahl mainframes, and the IBM XA 
architecture (I did work to port it to a 4381).

We put out a tender to get a 4381 running that, and got a VAXcluster 
instead!