[Info-vax] completion status from LIB$SPAWN

[Paul Sture]

On Sun, 29 Apr 2012 21:40:39 +0200, Johnny Billquist wrote:

> On 2012-04-29 20:48, David Froble wrote:
>> Paul Sture wrote:
>>> On Sun, 29 Apr 2012 14:09:41 +0000, glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
>>>
>>>> Paul Sture <paul at sture.ch> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> (snip)
>>>>> There's also the history of compilers to consider. In my experience
>>>>> many commercial users (as opposed to scientific or academic users)
>>>>> who came to VAX/VMS in the early 1980s fell into 2 main camps: a)
>>>>> those who came from PDPs or other minis where BASIC was very popular
>>>>> b) those who came from more traditional mainframes where COBOL was
>>>>> pretty much king for business applications (IBM also had PL/I users
>>>>> in this sector).
>>>> And scientific users, mostly using Fortran.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Yes, and FORTRAN was the only HLL available for VMS when it first
>>> became available to ordinary customers. Was the earliest FORTRAN-IV? I
>>> did have that available on VMS at the end of 1980 (and was very glad
>>> for business usage when FORTRAN-77 came along with character variables
>>> among other new features).
>>>
>>>
>> With the introduction of the Vax 11/780 in 1978 the initial target was
>> scientific users. Back at that time, that was a large market for DEC.
>>
>> Later, Basic Plus 2 was released on the 11/780 using PDP-11
>> compatibility mode. Several of the early systems had the PDP-11
>> compatibility mode, 11/750 and 11/730, and perhaps a few more. It
>> worked, but, it was PDP-11 compatibility mode, with the addressing
>> limitations, and still used the dreaded TKB and overlays.
> 
> Back in VMS V1, basically everything was running in compatibility mode,
> FORTRAN included. And you still used RSX tools in general. One by one,
> VMS versions were developed of everything.

My first version of VMS was v2.1, swiftly moving to V2.3, and yes there 
were plenty of compatibility tools still used.  V3 brought a lot of 
native stuff, BACKUP, CONVERT (I really did _not_ miss the RSX indexed 
file loader, for it used to abort without any useful error message).

V4.0 was I think the first version where the RSX compatibility became an 
option at installation time.  By then we didn't really need any of the 
compatibility mode utilities.  PIP however was the only way to access a 
file by file id at that point.
 
> As for PDP-11 compatibility mode in hardware, that existed in every
> machine until the VAX 8600 (and 8650). After that, it was all done in
> software.
> 

-- 
Paul Sture