[Info-vax] OT: Rob Short: Operating System Evolution

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 01-01-2010 16:12, John Vottero wrote:
> "JF Mezei" <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> wrote in message
> news:001c305f$0$28514$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com...
>> Neil Rieck wrote:
>>>
>>> You are correct about people looking upon technology as a religion. I
>>> was once a huge fan of the Apple religion until I watched Apple make a
>>> series of product changes which proved to me that Apple management was
>>> less involved in the Apple religion than their customers
>>
>> I would agree with that. Apple simply fosters te religion and then takes
>> advantage of the loyalty of its customer base. God (Steve Jobs) rarely
>> touches the customers.
>>
>> However, the Apple religion is about being different, and better quality
>> than the other religion.
>>
>> The Windows religion is about comforming with the rest of the world, it
>> is about not being different and doing the same stuff as everyone else.
>
> If Windows was about "not being different", they would have stuck with
> Java instead of inventing the .NET Framework.

They had some legal problems with SUN.

>> You don't see Windows missionaries pushing that Windows is better. Their
>> only argument is that it is "compatible" because everyone uses it.
>>
>
> That's not what I see. Everything that I see is about doing something
> better.
>
> One of the things that made OpenVMS great was the OpenVMS Calling
> Standard which enable mixed language development. This enabled the
> creation of a large set of system services, libraries and utilities
> which could all be written in any language and called from any language.
>
> Microsoft created the Common Language Runtime (CLR) which improved on
> the OpenVMS Calling Standard and extended it to support object oriented
> environments. This enabled the creation of the .NET Framework which is a
> large collection of services, libraries and utilities (and it's growing
> fast!).

CLR (or actually CTS) provides the same for a modern development
environment as VMS calling standard did a couple of decades ago.

But I don't think there is any direct inspiration. Anders H has as far
as I know no VMS background at all.

And even though it was not pushed by SUN, then the JVM had already
showed the concept in the late 90's by allowing mixing of Java code,
Ada code (JGnat) and Python code (Jython).

Arne