[Info-vax] VAX VMS going forward

[Bob Wilson]

On Thursday, July 23, 2020 at 5:40:15 PM UTC-4, Michael Moroney wrote:
> Bob Wilson <bwandmw at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> >> Mako V8.0, Jaws V8.1, Topaz V8.2, Dory V8.2-1, Nemo V8.3, Orion 
> >> V8.3-1H1, Jedi V8.4. 
> 
> >Yeah, yeah...too many, too much. Don't forget Ghost, Zombie, Eureka, Redtail, 
> >and various other things that never saw the light outside of ZKO.
> 
> I remember a sequence Thunderbolt, Hickory, Phoenix, three cancelled streams in 
> a row which raised many eyebrows. I don't remember what was to be in them or 
> why they were cancelled. The good thing about the build system is that things 
> propagate forward, so a minor change unrelated to the major features of, say, 
> Thunderbolt was checked into Thunderbolt, it would have gone forward into the 
> next release and the next... Part of the magic in something like this is 
> manually setting things in cancelled projects to propagate/not propagate as 
> necessary.

Yikes Mike! That's going back a looooong ways. Weren't they (Thunderbolt, etc.) in the V5.x era (maybe post V5.5-2)? I wasn't in VMS at that time (my VMS era started at V6.2, which I think was in 1992). I managed VMS systems from V2.3 on [not in VMS, but at various DEC engineering groups] (I was a "user" on V2.2, they didn't want me to manage a VMS system yet because it didn't have a native BACKUP utility, which as I recall arrived in V2.3).

> Part of the magic in ...

That's the VDE piece that's missing from the VAX master pack. For all it's warts VDE makes it a lot easier to manage 400 CMS libraries as a single entity (n.b. the current VMS O/S master pack for Alpha, IA64 and x86 is over 400 facilities [each "facility" is a separate CMS library]).