[Info-vax] History of DECSET / CMS

[Andrew Shaw]

On Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 6:19:24 PM UTC+11, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 3/31/2020 1:48 AM, Andrew Shaw wrote:
> 
> > The biggest issue is, again, lack of VMS expertise in this country.
> 
> I'm going to suggest that for specific situations, nobody actually has 
> expertise until they are trained in (or understand) what is needed. 
> People can come with knowledge, but will they learn what is required, 
> or, will they attempt to change the job to what they know?
> 
> VMS is not hard to learn.  Regardless, the OS isn't what is important, 
> it's the local apps and needs that is important.
> 
> Not having point-n-click will be an issue for some people, but, 
> surprise, point-n-click doesn't solve all problems.
> 
> Is someone who doesn't want to learn anything they don't already know 
> really all that helpful?
> 
> As for wanting to give up a working solution and trying to replace it, 
> that is very expensive.  If people want to throw money away, I'll give 
> them my address.  I've seen such decisions destroy companies.  Of 
> course, by then it's too late.  And those who cause such will just take 
> another job.
> 
> -- 
> David Froble                       Tel: 724-529-0450
> Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc.      E-Mail: davef at tsoft-inc.com
> DFE Ultralights, Inc.
> 170 Grimplin Road
> Vanderbilt, PA  15486

I agree 100% with all of that Dave :-)

I would suggest though that there is a difference between someone who has been taught how to get things done in a VMS environment and someone who inherently understands VMS. Having said that though, Yes, we all were new to VMS at one point and we all had to learn how to get stuff done.

As I mentioned before we have a lot of the gnu stack installed on our VMS boxes and so most of our devs can "get stuff done" using the VMS ports of bash and vi. Don't get me wrong, these ports are great and do a really good job of enabling folk who are not VMS fluent to be productive and so that is absolutely a good thing.

A lot of the devs I work with now initially thought that VMS was some flavour of *nix that they hadn't encountered yet when they started !