[Info-vax] Hard links on VMS ODS5 disks

[gah4]

On Monday, July 24, 2023 at 5:50:56 PM UTC-7, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

(snip)
> But trying to evaluate decisions of the past using todays 
> knowledge is a totally futile exercise. 
 
> If you plan on inventing a time machine and travel back in 
> time to tell them to do things differently, then maybe. But 
> otherwise then accept that decisions was made based on 
> available information at the time for the decisions. And 
> complaining about such decisions does not change a thing. 

Not that I don't like VAX, but they pretty much did everything wrong.

The 512 byte page size was likely already too small, but definitely
too small a few years later.

A CISC instruction set designed to make it easy for assembly
programmers, just at the time that systems programming was
moving to high level languages.

And an instruction set not at all well designed for pipelined
processing.

Consider how hard it is to figure out how long an instruction is!

It would have been, maybe just a little bit, better to put all the
address mode bytes immediately after the opcode.