[Info-vax] DCL's flaws (both scripting and UI)

[David Froble]

Bill Gunshannon wrote:

> All this just makes me more curious.  Y'all say the use of "<" and ">"
> was derived from RSX.  Well, if RSTS came out in 1970 and RSX didn't
> show up until 1973 and RSTS used "[" and "]", why did RSX change this
> only to have it go back in VMS?
> 
> bill
> 

I'm going to take a try at this, but damn Bill, it's been a very long time.

RSTS initially was limited, I think, to Basic Plus.  Not sure if it even 
had an assembler.

Evans, Griffith, and Hart was / is a software firm in MA.  Wish John 
Santos was around, he might have much more info ....

Anyway, it is my understanding that Dave Hart (I think it is Dave) wrote 
Basic Plus.  It just may be that RSTS was written to support Basic Plus. 
  It may not have been a DEC developed product.

On the other hand, RSX was a DEC developed OS, and VMS has a lot of 
heritage there.  I do remember that some of the RSTS users spent lots of 
effort to get DEC to put things from RSTS into VMS.  Early VMS was 
heavily slanted toward scientific computing.  Fortran was the first 
supported compiler.  It was the commercial software people who were 
using Basic.

This was a long time ago, and I wasn't real close to how things 
happened, I was just a RSTS/E and Basic Plus user in 1974.