[Info-vax] New CEO of VMS Software

[Scott Dorsey]

Dan Cross <cross at spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote:
>I remember hating it.  Coming from a more "traditional" Unix
>background, it was ... weird.  Printing, storage management,
>man pages, the security infrastructure, all felt gratuitously
>different for no real reason.  You were almost forced to use
>their menu-driven management tools, but as the USENIX button at
>the time said, "SMIT happens."  It all felt very big-M
>"Mainframe" inspired.  The compilers were very good, and the
>machines were fast, but the developer tools weren't bundled and
>I remembered fighting a lot of third-party software to get it to
>compile and run properly.

Having started on OS/360, it seemed very much a throwback to that kind of
environment to me.  Many of th AIX things were weird but were very welcome
in a mainframe world, like real batch queue management.  The automated 
management was awful for somebody running a single server but I think it
might have been a good thing for somebody running hundreds of them because
it did give a sort of central management years before puppet or ansible.

>That was all weird because, on the 6150 ("RT") machines they had
>offered a very nice version of 4.3BSD Tahoe plus NFS to the
>academic community; clearly, people at IBM knew how to "do" Unix
>right.

AIX wasn't designed with Unix users in mind.  I think AIX was designed to
make things easier for people who were coming from the AS/400 or System/34
world.

>Weirdest for me was the lack of a real console.  There was a
>3-digit 7-segment LED display that would cycle through various
>numbers as the system booted up; things that would have been
>emitted to a serial port on a VAX (or even a Sun) were instead
>represented by random collections of digits, and there was a
>book you had to look at to see what was going on if something
>hung.  Something like "371" was "fsck failed on /usr."  (I don't
>recall if that was the exact code).  Then were was a the damned
>key, where the system wouldn't boot if it was in the "locked"
>position.  Which sucked if the machine crashed for some random
>reason.  I walked into a lab one day and the entire network was
>down because all the machines had crashed over some network
>hiccup and the damned sysadmin had turned everything to "Locked"
>for some obscure reason ("it's more secure.")  I guess he was
>right: it's certainly more "secure" if no one can use the
>computers.  :-/

Again, I think this was because the intention was to run a million
workstations with a single admin.  If something goes wrong to prevent 
booting, you just swap the machine out with a new one and have your 
on-site IBM FE fix it.
--scott

-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."