[Info-vax] CRTL and RMS vs SSIO

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Sunday, October 17, 2021 at 1:00:38 PM UTC+13, John Dallman wrote:
>> Would you entrust mission-critical business 
>> functions to an OS that can only handle 26 drive letters?
> Ah, sir is not aware that Windows has grown some useful capabilities over 
> the last 25 years.

“Sir” is aware that Microsoft has _tried_ to grow some useful capabilities onto Windows NT over the last 25 years. But has managed to compromise the underlying foundations in the process (look at how badly the multiuser protections were compromised in Windows XP, and the attempts to retrofit UAC to fix the mess in Vista and later). This is what happens when OS development is driven by a marketing department, as opposed to the needs of the user community.

> The Distributed File System looks a little odd, but 
> it's actually equivalent to an auto-mounter that needs less configuration 
> and it works well.

Samba does everything that SMB/CIFS supports, and does it on Linux, with greater configurability.

>>> They need to be able to transition to a commercial-grade VMS on 
>>> x86-64 before they're forced to drop VMS and thus stop paying 
>>> VSI. So VSI need to take the route from here-and-now that 
>>> produces a commercial product most rapidly. 
>> 
>> Precisely my point.

> So you're claiming all the VMS APIs and services can be implemented on 
> top of Linux, with a reasonable level of effort, by this time next year?

The sooner it is started, the sooner it is done. A year to implement the most important core user-mode APIs, as well as a DCL interpreter? May be doable, with a team of maybe half a dozen or less. If you can find the right half-dozen.

> May I suggest you start a project to demonstrate this? 

You want to do a pilot? Offer an example app that you think will cause trouble, and we can go over it step by step.