[Info-vax] Whither VMS?

[P. Sture]

In article <7i3r4fF2v7ng5U3 at mid.individual.net>,
 Bob Eager <rde42 at spamcop.net> wrote:

> 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!

Do you remember CAFS - Content Addressable File Store? One of our VAX 
customers used that on their ICL kit and reported that it was blazingly 
fast for the time (early 1980s).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Addressable_File_Store>

-- 
Paul Sture