[Info-vax] VMS on Raspberry Pi 5

[Martin Gregorie]

On Tue, 14 Nov 2023 18:05:21 +0100, Johnny Billquist wrote:

> So in which way do you think VMS is so different than all of the above?
>
Its been a long time, but as I already said,

VMS seemed to have a few portmanteau commands where the other OSen had a 
host of single function commands. For instance, to access the equivalents 
of the Unix commands rm, cp, less and ls under VAX/VMS you first logged in 
(same as unix) but then you had to start a package (sorry, but I don't 
remember its name) to access its own command line and then run  the UNIX-
like comands.

That's stuck with me because no UNIX or Linux system works that way.and 
logging to every other OS I've used has given immediate access to a 
command line. The main deviation from this plot are IBM's OS/400 and ICL's 
2900 series running under VME/B,

Both these have much more rational command naming systems than either 
Unix/Linux or an excellent command look-up system: command names are so 
regular and that's backed a special key that shows your full screen prompt 
with help text and default parameter values already filled in and 
mandatory ones left blank. Any Invalid parameters you enter are merely 
flagged up ready for correction.

VME/B commands had two names, one abbreviated and a bit cryptic for direct 
input to the command line and the other much longer and intended for use 
in command scripts. For instance, 'x' always meant 'delete' and 'f' always 
meant 'file', so the command to delete a file could  be entered as either  
"xf myfile" or as deletefile("myfile");

OS/400 is quire similar here, except that command and file names could 
never be more than 9 characters long and so often appeared to like line 
noise. For instance and there were no just three letter groups so: 

crtrpgpgm  is the RPG3 compiler  (Create RPG program)
crtplipgm  is the PL/1 compiler
crtcblpgm  is the COBOL compiler

To OS/400 'rpg' means RPG and 'pgm' always means 'program, 
          ie once you understand the naming system, you can often 
          guess what a command would be called. 

Also, both systems also had a 'search by name' ability that could be run
from the command line or from the text editor if you were editing a 
command file.

The major failing of both OS is that neither had a hierarchic filing 
system, such as both UNIX/Linux and Windows (and even DOS) provide.

I always thought this was odd, since George 3 had a hierarchical filing 
system way back in 1970, when I first got my hands on it, but then again
VME/B and OS/400 (which AFAIK was a resurrected version of IBM's Future 
Series which was killed off in about 1971) were first conceived somewhere 
in the early 1970s, i.e. after MULTICS was up and running, and which DID 
have a hierarchic filing system.    
   
> And with alias for things, along with symlinks, Unix isn't really any
> different there either.
>
True enough, provided you exclude dinosaurs like S/360, AS/400, 2903s 
(been there too, but its just an ICL 1900 emulator running on box 
containing an ICL 2900 disk controller). Hierarchic filing systems as we 
know then now, seem to have originated with MULTICS, and maybe the ICL 
1900 George 3 OS (Manually operated 1900s and 2903/4 all had flat filing 
systems like MSDOS, FLEX, etc). 

My guess is that development of the 1900 and S/360 and all the other early 
mainframes started just a bit too early for their designers to have seen 
MULTICS and decided that hierarchic filing systems were the way to go.

> Well, apropos is just a simple tool for one thing. Which is just a way
> to search man-pages.
> 
Sure, but I wouldn't be surprised to fins that 'apropos' is just a wrapper 
round 'find'.
 
> find on the other hand can be used for almost anything
>
These days I mostly use 'locate' because its faster thanks to its 
associated overnight index update, for anything a bit more complex, i.e. 
with a bit of formatting included, 'awk / gawk' is my tool of choice.


-- 

Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org