[Info-vax] VMS on Raspberry Pi 5

[Martin Gregorie]

On Tue, 14 Nov 2023 13:41:27 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> On 11/14/2023 1:21 PM, Martin Gregorie wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> Now I am confused.
> 
> If you login to VMS you have immediate access to DCL commands.
>
Its been a very long time (1990 or thereabouts and thats the only VAX-
based project I was on, but I distinctly remember that login gave you a 
command line, but if you wanted to, say, get rid of old versions of a few 
files you had to start a a portmanteau program that gave access to all the 
file and directory manipulation functions via its own command line, and 
once you'd done all that, toy exited from that program to get back to the 
command line where logging in had left you.
    
> If you want to use *nix commands you need to start something (very old
> Eunice, old posix or new GNV bash or something similar).
>
At that time I'd not yet seen UNIX, but was familiar with a UNIX-like 
command line, first for seven years (1970-77) on ICL's George 3 OS (1900 
hardware) and then another three years (1978-1981) on ICL's VME/B OS (2960 
hardware).

> If you login to Linux you have immediate access to *nix commands.
> If you want to use DCL commands you need to start some third party DCL
> implementation (Sector 7 ??).
> 
Pass. While I'd been (amongst other things) a COBOL and assembler 
programmer and  George 3 sysadmin on ICL 1900 kit and designed and written 
database systems on an ICL 2960 in COBOL using an IDMSX Codasyl database 
system, I was just a database developer on the VAX system, so had no 
knowledge of much about it apart from what I needed to write COBOL and 
interface that with DEC's relational database system.

-- 

Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org