[Info-vax] Vax Station 4000 VLC

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 12/24/2018 7:09 PM, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 12/24/2018 5:28 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> On 2018-12-24 11:29:08 +0000, Simon Clubley said:
>>> BTW, I can just hear Stephen right now: "Line mode. How. Quaint." :-)
>>
>> The whole area—the OpenVMS system configuration, the EDT editor, the
>> process quotas, the licensing, the DECwindows startup—is at least
>> several buttloads of quaint, yes.  Replete with quaint.  Overly quaint.
>> Deeply quaint.
>> For those of you unfamiliar with imperial measurements, two buttloads of
>> quaint is roughly a kiloliter of quaint.
> 
> This entire topic is very non-trivial.
> 
> For instance, what "new" type of UI would be appropriate for VMS?  I 
> sure don't have a clue.

GUI is not really important for VMS.

Sure a newer X and GTK could be nice, but I don't think it would help
VSI sell a single VMS license.

> You want "simply awful", I give you REGEDIT ....
> 
> No way is managing or setup of VMS anywhere near to that abortion.
> 
> Just because some apps do all the registration stuff behind the scenes 
> in any way justifies that abortion ....

Nothing wrong with the regedit tool itself.

But the registry concept turned bad.

It probably sounded pretty cool back in the 90's: instead
of having 50 different config files with a few configuration
options then having it all in one place and managed by a single
tool.

Today it is common to have hundreds of thousands of registry
entries so it is impossible to get a good overview.

And it obviously does not help with the rather obscure way COM
uses the registry.

MS has somewhat realized that and .NET is back to app config
files.

Arne