[Info-vax] Reinventing VMS logical names (Fuchsia & Win NT)

[Jake Hamby (Solid State Jake)]

On Thursday, November 9, 2023 at 12:40:38 PM UTC-8, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> DEC did a whole lot of work on DCE. 
> 
> OpenVMS itself never particularly incorporated DCE within, but DCE was 
> what DEC was both pushing internally and externally back at the time. 
> 
> Microsoft picked up DCE and ran with it, via the related COM/DCOM/OLE 
> stuff, and all of what was built upon that. 
> 
> But I'd expect the usage of the OpenVMS registry system services is 
> approximately zilch, too.

At my university, one of the professors and one of the other undergrads were really into DCE and setting up DFS and using it everywhere. The undergrad was extremely anti-VMS and pro-UNIX, as was the style at the time, so they were doing everything with Digital UNIX and some DCE solution for Solaris.

DCE was a nice idea but it really lost out in the court of public opinion for being expensive, promoted by "dinosaur" companies, and not being OO, in contrast to CORBA, which had its own problems, but was popular enough to get incorporated into the standard Java libraries until it was finally only recently dropped.