[Info-vax] VMS x86 performance ?

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 11/3/20 9:16 AM, Henry Crun wrote:
> On 03/11/2020 9:00, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
>> In article <rnp19d$al7$1 at dont-email.me>, Simon Clubley
>> <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:
>>
>>> On 2020-10-31, Dave Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>>>> About 2 months after I started on VMS, RSTS was forgotten ....
>>>
>>> This times a million. The only thing I missed from RSTS/E was the
>>> ability to detach an interactive job and there were ways around
>>> that problem.
>>
>> That and command completion are the only two things on unix which I
>> don't have on VMS, though there are various workarounds.  Having said
>> that, these two things aren't as important on VMS as on unix.
>>
> 
> Things I miss on VMS that I remember from RSTS/E
> 
> 1. The SYSTAT cusp, which showed details of running jobs
> (Took a while, but I have a VMS equivalent. Linux has top and htop)
> 2. The UTILTY program which had an option to force input to another process
> (Useful for saving stuck users, or changing batch jobs mid-stream)
> 3.An undocumented, unsupported SYS call (IIRC SYS(chr(10...) ) which 
> allowed
> a suitably privileged System Manager to see anaother process' or user's 
> input buffers.
> (Not used often, but an occasional lifesaver!)
> 
> OTOH what I don't miss:
> ACCT.SYS -- all the passwords readable, and using the KED editor 
> (pre-EDT) left it readable on disk.

A lot of systems (maybe most or all?) if they even had passwords
stored them unencrypted in those days.

> Having to jump through hoops to use the equivalent of a batch queue

Guess I don't know what "hoops" there were.  Running batch jobs on RSTS
was pretty much the same as on other OSes.  Some even required operator
intervention to run a batch job at all.

> TKB runs taking hours (The first time I ran LINK on VMS it completed so 
> fast I was sure something was wrong!)

That probably had more to do with the power of the system than the
commands used.  How long do you think TKB would take if RSTS still
ran today and the CPU's were all clocked in Ghz.

It seems anytime people compare "the good ole days" they compare
1970's systems to 2020 systems without allowing for differences like
changes in hardware technology.  If RSTS had been handled like VMS
it would be running on X86-64, using GB's of memory and modified to
take advantage of the new hardware without abandoning the underlying
philosophy of the OS.

bill


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