[Info-vax] Unable to install freeware

[lawrencedo99 at gmail.com]

On Sunday, June 19, 2016 at 7:43:29 PM UTC+12, Richard Levitte wrote:
> Den söndag 19 juni 2016 kl. 03:35:09 UTC+2 skrev lawren... at gmail.com:
>> Wonder why VMS fought kicking and screaming against bringing in the idea of
>> stream-formatted files, and still wants to insist that everything be
>> formatted as a record...
> 
> Well, it's a record oriented OS from the start (*ahem* I assume it is.  It
> has been since 1989, when I started working with it).

I first encountered it in 1980 as an undergrad, when the University got its first 11/780. (VMS V2.2, as I recall.) The difference from RSTS/E on the PDP-11/70 was ... mind-blowing--e.g. directory listings that had what were almost actual sentences. It was record-oriented then, too.

I think stream-format records (how about that for an oxymoron) were added in VMS V3?

> Record orientation has its benefits as well...  for example, you don't really
> have to wonder and try to heuristically determine if a file is binary or not,
> the record format will tell you :-)

Actually, no it doesn’t.