[Info-vax] OT: obscure PDP11 OSes (even more dinosaury)

[David Froble]

Bill Gunshannon wrote:

> As I have stated in the past, one project I would love to do, just
> for the fun of it, was port RSTS to other architectures, both large
> and small.  I can envision RSTS/86 with X-11 and large dataspace so
> things like Postgres and otehr cool toold cold be ported.  Does it
> have some commercial value?  Even i seriously doubt it, but as one
> who really liked RSTS back in  the day, it wold be a lot of fun
> doing it.  And who know who else might have fun working on and
> enhancing it.  Even Minix is still being worked on.
> 
> bill
> 

Maybe I should not do this, but I do have a "mean" side.

It took me 2 months to get over RSTS.  I'll tell you why.

With RSTS I could now most or all of it's capabilities, because of the 
number of capabilities.  Basically, RSTS was restricted.  It was 
restricted because of the limited virtual address space.  Programs could 
be only so big, and no matter how good you were, when you ran out of 
address space, you ran out of things you could add to programs.

Once I learned a bit with VAX, there was no looking back.  That took 
those 2 months.  That said, I think there are things about VMS on VAX 
and later systems that I still haven't learned.  The bottom line is, a 
whole large world of possibilities had open up to me.

With RSTS, there was usually one way to do thing.  With VMS you actually 
got confused having to decide how to do things, choosing from many more 
options.  That was the early problem with VMS, people had to learn so 
much more, because there was much more to learn.  But once you did, you 
were much more productive.  You could do things that you just could not 
easily do on RSTS.

So even if you re-implemented RSTS on today's HW, if you stuck to what 
it was, you'd have a subset of what VMS could do.  Perhaps a rather 
small subset.  You'd also have an easier task, since the magnitude of 
the task would be rather small.

More nails for the coffin ....