[Info-vax] Vax Station 4000 VLC

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-12-25 00:09:25 +0000, Dave Froble said:

> But, back to VMS.  "Don't give me problems, give me solutions."  I 
> agree there is vast room for improvement, but, real serious question, 
> what would be an improvement
> I'm thinking that no matter the UI, there will need to be some serious 
> knowledge required to use it.

Sure, if you think any of this stuff actually needs a management UI or 
dinking around with MODPARAMS or SYSTARTUP_VMS or SYLOGICALS the rest.  
It doesn't.

Install DECwindows, and have that raise the parameters and add itself 
to the automatic launch, and off we go.  At most, this involves a 
switch for "start DECwindows" or not.

And pragmatically, the default here should be to integrate DECwindows, 
and to automatically start DECwindows if there's a graphics controller 
found.  If it's not manually disabled.

We're just not stuffing our entire universe onto RA81 disks any more.

There's decades of trade-offs layered here, and decisions and 
trade-offs that make little or no sense.

Not with the storage capacities of current SSDs and HDDs.   Capacities 
that are only getting larger.

Same for the separation of IP networking.

For the three or five folks that need some far more arcane setting, 
allow that to be manually configured via GUI, or via SYSMAN or some 
replacement CLI tool for really arcane settings.

I can point to operating systems that have been doing exactly what's 
described above, and for many years.

Nothing DECwindows is doing is special or unique, and the same for IP 
networking and a number of other related busy-work installation and 
configuration details that OpenVMS folks are saddled with.

Though this user interface work won't get changed any time soon, 
because this work is not directly revenue generating.







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