[Info-vax] A portable VMS, was: Re: OS Ancestry

[Simon Clubley]

On 2021-05-19, Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:
> On 2021-05-17 19:12:23 +0000, Simon Clubley said:
>
>> ...Operating system concepts mostly have nothing to do with portability...
>
> Gonna have to decide if you're building new with ease of porting 
> OpenVMS apps to the new, or building new with close OpenVMS 
> compatibility with the old.
>

My comment refers back to the linked article where the regret was
that VAX was the architecture instead of VMS being the architecture
that was implemented on a C machine.

With a 2-mode architecture with C as an implementation language, you
could either have had everything that is currently VMS (clusters,
the DLM, VMS APIs, etc) implemented unchanged, or the same functionality
but implemented in a different way (DCL, RMS, etc).

It would have still been VMS, but implemented in a much more portable way.
There is nothing in the above list that would reduce portability to
a new architecture, which is the point I was making.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.