[Info-vax] OT: Arun Kishan

[John Santos]

In article <00c9936c$0$23454$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com>, 
jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca says...> 
> Neil Rieck wrote:
> 
> > Trying to replace the "Cutler is God" myth with "Windows is OpenVMS
> > Reimplemented" fact. Don't believe me? Then watch the Rob Short video:
> 
> 
> My old PSION PDA (circa early 1990s) had many features similar to VMS.
> It had the equivalent to mailboxes for interprocess communications, it
> had a DECNET like stack where you could remotely start tasks a d
> exchange data, and you could , on the PSION, edit files residing on
> another machine.  Priorities were similar as well (any priorty above 16
> got "real time" like stuff.
> 
> And there were rumours that a number of PSION engineers had come from
> DEC (Reading).
> 
> Does that make the PDA a "VMS re-implemented ?".
> 
> There are certain core concepts in an OS which are fairly common.
> 
> Windows doesn't have commonality iwt the VMS file system, it doesn'T
> have RMS, it doesn't have clustering, its file specifications are quite
> different, its device names are quite different.
> 

Kernel internals (modularity, device drivers, scheduler, memory
management, etc.) are supposed to be very similar to VMS.  None of
this is directly visible to users, but is critical for system 
reliability.  


> Let me ask you this: Data General was made up of a lot of ex DEC folks.
> Does this mean that AOS-VS was a re-implementation of VMS ? It was quite
> different to the user and system manager, even if some core concepts in
> the kernel might have been similar.

No!  This would be totally revisionist history.

The DG people left DEC during the early PDP-11 years (1969-1970 or
there abouts.)  I've heard, but don't know for sure, that the Nova
design was a 16-bit design very similar to the 12 and 18-bit DEC
machines, but DEC rejected it in favor of the (at the time) new and
very different Gordon Bell PDP-11 architecture.

DG started work on their 32-bit system about the same time as, and
in direct competition to, DEC starting work on the VAX and VMS.
I am almost totally unfamiliar with AOS, but it can't be a re-
implementation of VMS since it was written at the same time and
independently.

The DEC West people who left and went to Microsoft had years of
VMS experience *before* leaving.

> 
> 
> It is an insult to say that Windows is VMS re-implememted.
> Deffectors to Microsoft should not be glorified. People should limit
> themselves to stating that many ex-Digits went on to work at Microsoft.



-- 
John Santos
Evans Griffiths & Hart, Inc.