[Info-vax] Whither VMS?

[Bob Eager]

On Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:21:56 +0200, P. Sture wrote:

> 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>

I heard of it, but given that we were running a home grown operating 
system, it wasn't something we got involved with. EMAS did support the 
DAP (Distributed Array Processor) on the 2900 though.



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