[Info-vax] VMS on Raspberry Pi 5

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2023-11-14 13:39, Martin Gregorie wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Nov 2023 10:30:18 +0100, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> 
>> On 2023-11-14 00:40, Martin Gregorie wrote:
>>> On Mon, 13 Nov 2023 17:44:15 +0000, Pancho wrote:
>>>
>>>> Looking back on it now. I think the strangest thing about VMS was the
>>>> Manual Set.
>>>
>>> I was part of one, fairly large, project on VAX/VMS. I thought the
>>> oddest part of it was the way the usual collection of programmer's
>>> utilities were implemented as a handful of multi-function development
>>> tools, i.e. one program that handled all source file management tasks,
>>> another to take care of all comms tasks, etc. I've never met any other
>>> OS that was structured that way.
>>
>> What other OSes do you have experience with?
>>
> ICL:     UDAS, OLDAS, George 1`,2 and 3, VME/B
> Stratus: VOS
> IBM:     OS/400
> DEC:     VAX/VMS, TruUNIX (Alpha server)
> PC:      DOS, Windows, Unix, RedHat Linux
> 6809,    FLEX, OS/9
> 68000:   OS/9 68000
> Stratus: VOS
> Tandem:  Nonstop OS
> RPI:     Debian Linux

So in which way do you think VMS is so different than all of the above? 
I only know a few of the ones you list, but I do know a bunch of others. 
And to me, there is nothing I would say is strange, unique or even 
special about how VMS does things.

It is a bit different than under Unix-like systems, since commands don't 
necessarily have a 1:1 mapping to a binary. But apart from that, I fail 
to see much of a difference.

And with alias for things, along with symlinks, Unix isn't really any 
different there either.

> Source management is usually handled by one single program, even on most
>> systems today. Be that cvs, svn, git or whatever.
>>
> Indeed, I used CVS for years, now using Git
>    
>> And have you ever looked at find under Unix? That's a swiss army knife
>> if you ever saw one...
>>
> Use it a lot, also apropos,

Well, apropos is just a simple tool for one thing. Which is just a way 
to search man-pages. find on the other hand can be used for almost 
anything, and the number of switches/options available is more than any 
person can memorize. Admittedly, all the operations are related to 
files, but then again, almost anything is a file under Unix. ;-)

   Johnny