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

[John Wallace]

On Jan 2, 1:16 am, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber... at comcast.net>
wrote:
> VAXman- @SendSpamHere.ORG wrote:
> > In article <NN2dnTzv5dZFCKPWnZ2dnUVZ_jedn... at giganews.com>, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber... at comcast.net> writes:
> >> VAXman- @SendSpamHere.ORG wrote:
> >>> In article <THs%m.3839$Gf3.3... at newsfe22.iad>, "John Vottero" <JVott... at mvpsi.com> writes:
> >>>> <VAXman-  @SendSpamHere.ORG> wrote in message
> >>>>news:00A96DAF.7B635EAD at SendSpamHere.ORG...
> >>>>> In article <CR6%m.10040$0U1.5... at newsfe16.iad>, "John Vottero"
> >>>>> <JVott... at mvpsi.com> writes:
> >>>>>> "Michael Kraemer" <M.Krae... at gsi.de> wrote in message
> >>>>>>news:hhcfhb$6hu$00$1 at news.t-online.com...
> >>>>>>> Arne Vajhøj schrieb:
>
> >>>>>>>> MS is just another company trying to make as much money as possible.
>
> >>>>>>> There are ethical and unethical ways to make money.
> >>>>>>> It is (almost) always M$ that forces proprietary
> >>>>>>> formats.
> >>>>>> Are you suggesting that is is unethical to create proprietary systems?
> >>>>>> Doesn't that make OpenVMS unethical?
> >>>>> If that's its definition, then WEENDOZE is very much unethical.
>
> >>>>> I still fail to understand how people mistake ubiquity with openness.
> >>>> I agree!  Windows and OpenVMS are both proprietary operating systems which
> >>>> is one of the attributes that makes them GOOD!
> >>> You mean, it's the attribute that makes one of them good.  WEENDOZE can
> >>> never be considered good; not even poor!  Crap is the proper adjective
> >>> to describe WEENDOZE.
>
> >> You are living in the past Brian!  W/XP is quite usable and I have been
> >> using it for several years now.  W/2K wasn't all that bad either.  I ran
> >> Windows 2.x so I know what "bad" *IS*!!
>
> > Even the newest version -- WEENDOZE 7 Deadly Sins -- looks cheese on the
> > few I've checked out at the Staples, Best Buys, etc.  You'd think that a
> > company with all that money could and would hire at least one decent art-
> > ist to make its product not look pale next to Super Mario Brothers.
>
> Picky, picky, picky!  I don't use Windows for it's looks.  I use it to
> read my mail and newsgroups.  Sometimes I even send mail.  Once a month
> I print checks to pay my bills.
>
> What, for example, is Windows going to do with e-mail that has a
> photograph as an attachment?  That's right! It will display the text and
> the photograph!  What will VMS do with the same message?  It *might*
> succeed in rendering the text.  The photograph?  Forget it!
>
> If I want to do some programming I crank up Reflection 4
> (VT-100/200/300/400/etc. emulation) and connect to my VAX or Alpha
> systems.  I have a real VT-510 terminal but I seldom use it for
> anything; the PC and Reflection is a lot more convenient.

"What is VMS going to do with email that has a picture in it?"

How soon we forget.

My recollection is that DEC invented Compound Document Architecture in
the mid 1990s. CDA applications supported embedded pictures (and other
embedded documents, even including multimedia). When properly
implemented, the documents could be displayed (and edited) as
graphical documents on a workstation (VMS or DEC UNIX), or in the
absence of a workstation there would be some fall-back format suitable
for display (or processing) as simple character-oriented stuff.

The relevant bundled VMS DECwindows application for mail would be
(rather obviously) DECwindows MAIL, if I remember rightly, although
there was also a "value added" separately licenced VMS DECwindows
corporate-mail client called something like "All in 1 Mail" (but which
was entirely unrelated to the other All-in-1). The underlying message
transport there was X.400, a mail architecture where security,
authentication, non-deniability, compund document support, etc was
built in, unlike SMTP (the legacy email protocol from the teletype
era), where a working and widely accepted version of stuff like that
still hasn't yet been invented. Hence 90%+ (?) of internet mail is
spam.

Obviously you needed a workstation to make best use of these apps, and
DEC management in general saw workstations as high end techy things,
rather than mass market things. Consequently there were very few of
them around internally in DEC, and very few DEC employees got to
understand what they could do.

If DEC HQ had anticipated today's need for multi-megabyte corporate
PowerPoint/DECpresent and similar files to be emailed around,
including not just clipart but embedded sound clips and maybe even
embedded video, things might have turned out a little different.

As it is, CDA begat OLE, and X.400 was largely outlived by SMTP, and
we are where we are. "Cheap" beats "good". Not always, but often
enough.