[Info-vax] OSes

[Hans Vlems]

Bill, in your OP you asked two questions:
1) which DEC os is the easiest to use?
2) does it have DECwindows?
The answer to 1) is VMS. It behaves like linux or unix, that is it has a command line interface and optionally a GUI. Now VMS commands have different names and a different syntax. E.g. The unix ls command translates to DIRECTORY. Unix passes parameters to commands via switches like:
 -switch value
VMS calls it qualifiers and uses:
 /SWITCH=VALUE
If you are familiar with unix then VMS is pretty easy to learn (as a user, which is what you asked).

Now DECwindows. First it has nothing to do with Windows that comes from Microsoft. DECwindows is a general name for two GUI products: VAX Workstation Software (VWS) and Motif. If you are familiar with unix then you know whatt Motif is. VWS is obsolete since VAX / VMS V5.0 so not really interesting nor useful.

In a subsequent post you suddenly came up with MacOS X. If that is your only available platform you can run simh on it and boot VAX/VMS. 

Hans