Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!munnari!murdu!ucsvc!u8551087
From: u8551087@ucsvc.dn.mu.oz
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Re: Help us defend against VMS!
Message-ID: <43@ucsvc.dn.mu.oz>
Date: 3 Mar 88 12:40:34 GMT
References: <2235@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Lines: 217
Organisation: The University of Melbourne


In article <2235@bsu-cs.UUCP>, bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
> 
>>Hello Unix Wizards!
>>
>>	Our campus is almost on the verge of being turned into a VMS
>>filled campus due to the lack of knowledge of the person in charage of
>>computing services here.  The next couple of months will determine
>>what the campus computer scene will be like during the next decade.
>>This person has in mind buying Vaxes with VMS, and DECnet with lots of
>>money...
> 
> The basic problem with VMS is that it locks you into a single hardware
> architecture and vendor. In this day and age that severely limits what
> you can purchase in computing power. Vaxes vary widely in price but
> not much in processing power. For example, a small uVax-II sells for
> around $30K and offers a little less than 1 MIP. An 8750 sells for
> perhaps $500K and offers a few MIPs. In the near future this range
> closes even further, the uVax-3 being around 1/2 the processing power
> of the top end with a price range of ten-fold. It's hard to buy worse
> price-performance.
> 
> The Unix market ranges from PC based Unix systems which the average
> student can afford (and this area is expanding rapidly) to the Cray-2,
> a premiere super-computer, and just about everything in between. In
> the middle market (typical small-medium scale time-sharing) one can
> buy Unix systems from various vendors with upwards of ten times the
> price performance of VMS.
> 
> Unix systems are relatively bundled, beyond mere hardware
> considerations most Unix systems right out of the box are completely
> useable. It can be supplemented in many significant ways with free or
> nearly free (eg.  ~$100 for an entire campus) software. VMS is heavily
> unbundled, from day one if you want so much as a compiler you begin
> layering heavy costs. And you'll pay a separate price for acquiring
> and maintaining software on every CPU running VMS on campus. This will
> quickly lock you out of the workstation market, having to add $100K in
> basic software costs to 40 VMS workstations can put a real damper on a
> typical University's plans, no matter how good the intentions.
> 
> Unix is the premiere system for compute intensive areas, such as the
> sciences using Fortran. The reason is the vast range of power a
> program written to run under Unix presents. As I said, a program
> developed on a small, affordable PC or workstation can be copied and
> re-run on huge compute engines. Although a lot of the sciences in the
> past used VMS they now generally realize that this was an error and
> the communities are rapidly switching to Unix, any argument that
> science is done on VMS is a false argument of the past. You should
> poll major science depts and research labs. If nothing else, the fact
> that the Cray and other super-computers run Unix has pushed the
> equation in this favor, a person using VMS is essentially locked out
> of the entire NSF super-computer initiative. Decnet would tend to
> reaffirm this retardation (TCP can be had on VMS but it's sort of like
> teaching a pig to dance, speak to VMS sites and they'll tell you what
> a general pain in the ass it is to deal with third party vendors,
> network software breaking on each O/S release etc etc.)
> 
> The typical claim by the campus administrator is to point at all the
> myriad applications and big-name software that runs on VMS and doesn't
> run on Unix. In the first place, most of this now does run on Unix so
> that tends to be an anachronistic view. Another point is that such
> admins usually have DP-envy. No one on the campus has any need for any
> of the big-name applications the person is bragging about, you're
> running an academic environment, not a bank! Get a list of these
> applications and you'll see how ludicrous this consideration is.  Unix
> tends to vastly dominate the academic community in software
> availability.  These admins will sneer at things like X-windows, lisp
> (which doesn't cost $10K/node), AI systems etc in preference to their
> big-name commercial databases and spread-sheets as if what students
> and professors do is not to be taken seriously, then why are they on a
> campus? It's no accident that both Athena and Andrew have chosen Unix
> for their massive campus computing projects.
> 
> Unix makes available the forefront of hardware technology, parallel
> processing from companies like Encore, Sequent, BBN (Butterfly), RISC
> and the so-called "super-workstations" like Sun/4, MIPS, HP etc. which
> can deliver nearly 1MIP/$1K of price. The parallel processor provide
> time-sharing systems extending into the hundreds of MIPs, again for
> about $1K/MIP. Anything new and innovative runs Unix, not VMS, it
> would be foolish to lock an entire academic community out of all this.
> I can understand why a bank is not particularly concerned, but why a
> (supposedly) active research community? Why lock yourself out of all
> this. The VMS salesthings will claim that they're going to do all this
> *in the future*, they've been saying that for years and years, and
> when they do come out with something it tends to be too little too
> late, in name only, like a dual processor 8800 which barely exploits
> what tiny parallelism it has.
> 
> VMS itself is not an interesting operating system to learn or study.
> It is basically a re-work of RSX, an ancient real-time operating
> system from the PDP11 (Unix also ran on the PDP11 years ago, but it
> has grown in modern ways, as opposed to VMS's habit of just accreting
> whatever features were needed to meet the next big govt contract.)
> 
> The claim that Unix is somehow less secure than VMS is a red herring.
> Unix offers sufficient security for campus systems, you're not the NSA
> (again the tactic of arguing that VMS is better for things you don't
> need.) More importantly, many Unix systems are available with full
> sources for a modest price, typically $1000/campus (it's simply a
> matter of your vendor choices, more than you can say for VMS where
> there is no choice.) Without the sources you are, at best, at the
> mercy of the vendor for security. A huge security hole which is
> bringing you to your knees (which happens regularly on VMS, and the
> news travels the networks like wildfire) leaves you helpless and at
> the vendor's whims as to whether or not they feel like closing the
> hole this week, or next month, or put it off for next release.
> 
> In fact their concern with only commercial DP makes them *less*
> interested in your security problems. Banks don't have malicious
> students exploiting security holes and don't tend to notice such
> things or complain about them. With Unix and the sources you can at
> least plug up the hole by a code change and then call the vendor and
> wait for the real fix, at least you'll be up and running until then.
> Don't believe that VMS sources are available, it's a lie, demand to
> see prices for all items needed such as Decnet sources. Demand to be
> told what resources it would take to even manage such sources.  Last I
> checked it required the dedication of a few hundred thousand dollars
> in hardware (basically, an entire larger Vax with large disks) to
> manage sources.
> 
> Obviously the sources will also be of enormous benefit in answering
> user questions, such as tracking down example code using particular
> system calls. You can sort of do this with VMS's microfiche, if you
> consider searching through microfiche for a particular system call
> usage a good way to spend your time. You can't grep microfiche. Even
> then you'll usually find that the way the system application
> accomplishes what the user seems to want to do is by exploiting some
> privilege you won't want to give to a user (I'm not sure I want to go
> into the whole mess of the zillions of VMS "privilege" bits which
> you'll never fully understand the implications of and will almost
> surely end up giving away the store because some reasonable thing can
> only be accomplished by giving a user some dangerous privilege bit,
> Unix's single privilege scheme [root or not root] is much more secure,
> you just don't give out root privs and you know exactly what can and
> cannot be done by the two sets of users on your system, who wants to
> calculate the permutations of 30+ priv bits and what they might imply
> singly and in combination?.)
> 
> The programming and system interfaces in VMS are arcane and just a
> hodgepodge of features, there's no particular underlying design
> philosophy, just whatever marketing wanted this week. Although VMS has
> some interesting software features it's nearly impossible for anyone
> but a very experienced programmer to take advantage of these.  This is
> not really a damnation of VMS, VMS is a platform for delivering
> turnkey applications software, like databases in commercial
> environments for people who wouldn't think of programming in general,
> just data entry and report generation. I'm *sure* this is
> representative of your needs (hah!)
> 
> In an academic community one merely has to go into a campus bookstore
> to see another argument. Look at all the Unix books! Where are the VMS
> books?
> 
> There are none. A complete set of Unix manuals costs less than $100, a
> more than sufficient set costs perhaps $50. A complete set of VMS docs
> costs several hundred dollars, no student or even faculty member
> (except the few richest) can afford to own a documentation set for
> VMS. There's some on-line help in VMS but it's designed to sell
> manuals or supplement them, the details are always missing
> (purposely.)
> 
> Most Unix systems come with on-line, complete manual sets with the
> exact same text used to produce the printed manuals.  Thus, what's the
> cost to a student for Unix manuals? For $0 (zero) they can get
> everything, if they like manuals in their laps they can buy those for
> the cost of a couple of textbooks. To supplement that they can buy any
> of dozens of titles on Unix ranging from the structure of the
> operating system, systems programming, compiler construction,
> applications programming, AI, many programming languages, shell
> programming, text processing etc etc. For VMS you'll be lucky to find
> two titles (I can only think of one, the Internals book, and that's
> hardly a text, oh yeah, there's an assembler textbook, both of those
> are about five years old and don't even refer to the current VMS
> system so you won't be able to use their code etc.)
> 
> So, running courses on VMS will mean foresaking textbooks. Very clever!
> Good plan for running an academic environment! It's no accident, the
> DEC/VMS crowd has no interest in academia, your sysadmin has DP-envy.
> 
> Decnet nearly completely locks you out of wide-area networking, such
> as the arpanet. One need only look at the arpanet's University rolls
> to see who you are abandoning, merely the foremost schools and
> research labs in the country. About 95% of them use Unix systems to
> hook up to the arpanet. Decnet is completely useless in this regard.
> There are a couple of strange, semi-wide area networks based on DECNET
> (few people could name them.)  Perhaps one or two of your faculty
> would like to be on them. You should buy them a microvax and get on
> with the rest of the campus' needs, don't let the tail wag the dog.
> 
> And you can forget uucp and usenet entirely, which means no e-mail
> to vendors etc.
> 
> In summary, buying into VMS for a campus is buying into the past in a
> pathetic, nearly necrophilic way for an academic community. It locks
> them out of the mainstream in Computer Science, Engineering, the
> Sciences and many of the humanities (all the multi-media projects of
> any interest are being done on either Unix or or Macintosh/PC
> systems.) It has very little to offer an academic community for either
> research or coursework. It is flying in the face of nearly all trends
> in computing today and doing so at such a high dollar price that it
> borders on irresponsible. This is not to say that there is no need for
> even one VMS system on your campus, there probably is. But using it as
> a campus standard is irresponsible and completely without merit or
> rational justification and will cripple academic computing for years
> to come. What other campuses do this?
> 
> This is not a religious flame, I have presented myriad factual basis
> for my arguments. VMS people like to claim religious flame and
> "chocolate vs vanilla!" arguments. This is because they cannot deal
> with the real issues so making it a political war can only act to
> their advantage. Avoid the issues, get the opponents fired, scare a
> campus administrator with false promises of donations etc.
> 
> Unfortunately you may be up against an insidious cancer you only
> barely understand which will manipulate your organization in ways you
> will regret.
> 
> 	-Barry Shein, Boston University