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

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2021-05-19 17:38:50 +0000, Simon Clubley said:

> 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.

There are risks and trade-offs in any complex design.

I suspect the influence of Multics among the DEC designers of the VAX era.

Bell Labs took the ideas and designs of Multics in a different 
direction with Unix.

As for porting OpenVMS, VSI followed the porting approach used twice 
before, rather than the DEC R&D approach prototyped once.

Risks and trade-offs.


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