[Info-vax] VSI roadmap

[terry-...@glaver.org]

On Tuesday, August 22, 2023 at 10:19:59 PM UTC-4, Dave Froble wrote:
> What good would be a 2 GB record, when contemporary disk drives might be 100 MB, 
> or less?

ZFS supports filesystems of 2^128 bytes, well beyond what was possible when it was designed, or even today. It is a lot newer than RMS and thus has more experience with "can't scale" issues.

OTOH, some things in VMS show a small-system-memory mindset. I don't know If that's the reason for the 32KB limit or if it was inherited from the mostly-compatibility-mode environment of early VMS utilities.

I'll also mention again that if you want to get oddball record data out of RMS, you should probably look at C-Kermit's CKVFIO.C. There's code in there to deal with just about every possible RMS record type, including a few specific 3rd-party uses of "Undefined".