[Info-vax] Hard links on VMS ODS5 disks

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 7/21/2023 8:21 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2023-07-20, John Reagan <xyzzy1959 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thursday, July 20, 2023 at 8:20:43?AM UTC-4, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>> You have missed what I am saying above, so I may have been too subtle.
>>> Let me reword it: If VMS didn't have any Macro-32 or Bliss code in it,
>>> and didn't need to support them as application level programming languages,
>>> VMS would look much more internally like any another OS written in C does,
>>> and the port would have been completed years ago.
>> Ah, so you are commenting on the choices made in 1977.  C wasn't on the menu
>> of implementation languages.
> 
> Unix had been around for several years by then.
> 
> Other operating systems had been written in various higher-level languages
> before that.
> 
> It really is a pity that VMS didn't come along several years later
> when attitudes to writing full systems in assembly language had
> well and truly changed.

When DEC made the decisions back in the late 70's using assembler
and a proprietary low level language was not unusual.

And C was not that big a language yet. I don't even think
VAX C was available for the first VMS versions.

If DEC had been able to see into the future then they
may have gone with C.

But ...

Arne