[Info-vax] Hard links on VMS ODS5 disks

[Simon Clubley]

On 2023-08-23, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>
> It is difficult to anticipate the future.
>
> They made some choices that looked OK at the time.
>
> I suspect that it reflect the leadership.
>
> the engineering approach: let us choose something
> that we are 99.9% sure to work fine
>
> the visionary approach: let us choose something
> where there is 50% chance of huge success and
> 50% chance of total failure
>
> Engineers are trained to build stuff that is guaranteed
> to work.
>

And DEC had a very frustrating mix of being both not visionary and
then doing something that was very visionary.

First, they did the VMS design, which is most certainly not visionary,
but then a few years later they gave us a cluster design that was
literally a generation ahead of everyone else.

They also gave us the aborted Mica/Prism architecture, which would have
also been unique at the time. Oh, well.

Simon.

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