[Info-vax] OS Ancestry

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 5/17/2021 8:18 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2021-05-15, <kemain.nospam at gmail.com> <kemain.nospam at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Another pretty good link for those looking for VMS history:
>>
>> <http://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/digital/Bell_Retrospective_PDP11_paper_
>> c1998.htm>
>>
>> "A Retrospective on What We Have Learned From the PDP-11:
>> What Else Did We Need to Know That Could Have Been Useful in the Design of
>> the VAX-11 to Make Alpha Easier?
>>
>> "VMS is the Architecture That Mattered. not PDP-11, VAX, or Alpha"
> 
>  From that link:
> 
> | Thus, our real oversight was not understanding that VMS should have been
> | built on the C machine for portability across any architecture.
> 
> This. 5 zillion times this. VMS could have become like Unix in dominance
> if this had been the case.
> 
> Want to move VMS to a new architecture in this setup ? It would have been
> a comparable effort to what is involved in porting Linux to yet another
> architecture, instead of the current effort that is involved.
> 
> VMS was designed at too low of an abstraction level.

But it is worth remembering that back then (second half 1970's) then
it was not common to write OS in C. Assembler and proprietary languages
was common. That changed in the next 10-15 years.

But that one would be better off if one was able to predict the
future 10 years out is rather obvious.

Arne