[Info-vax] RMS intro

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Sun, 31 Dec 2023 17:11:45 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> On 12/31/2023 4:29 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> Support for STREAM_xx formats in RMS were not added until VMS 4.0, near
>> as I can tell. And that dates from around the time of the release of
>> the Mac.
> 
> That surprises me. I always thought they had been there since day 1.
> 
> But I started with VMS 4.4, so I don't know early VMS first hand.

I first got my hands on a VMS system in 1979. I was a first-year Comp Sci 
student, and first-year students were not supposed to have access to time-
sharing accounts. But the difference between that and RSTS/E (which I also 
was not supposed to have access to) was like night and day.

I’m not sure what version of VMS that was. It was likely 2.2, or possibly 
earlier. There was an interesting privilege-escalation security hole in 
2.2’s handling of message sections, which became quite clear if you read 
the internals manual ... which I only got my hands on after we had 
upgraded to 3.0.

I can remember quite a few other milestones off the top of my head. Like 
some compatibility issues with the third-party serial drivers in VMS 2.x, 
which went away in 3.0 because the terminal driver was split into a 
(hardware-independent) “class” driver and a (hardware-specific) “port” 
driver. This meant that third-party hardware vendors only needed to supply 
their own “port” driver, and they automatically got all the standard QIO 
and control-character support, just like DEC’s own terminal drivers.

VMS 4.0 was also the version that increased the length of file names from 
9-dot-3 to 39-dot-39.