[Info-vax] OS Ancestry

[Chris Townley]

On 17/05/2021 13:22, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> 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
> 
Didn't Unix change that? Was it not built in C from day 1?

-- 
Chris Townley