Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!ukc!its63b!hwcs!hwee!wortley
From: wortley@hwee.UUCP (Tim Wortley)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Help us defend against VMS!
Message-ID: <354@hwee.UUCP>
Date: 11 Mar 88 12:24:01 GMT
References: <12149@brl-adm.ARPA>
Reply-To: wortley@hwee (Tim Wortley)
Organization: Heriot-Watt University, Electrical Eng.
Lines: 32
Summary: A bit OTT

In article <12149@brl-adm.ARPA> KEN%ORION.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu (Kenneth Ng) writes:
>>Hah.  The only thing the VMS manuals have over the man pages is bulk.
>>I find them exceedingly verbose.
>Unfortunately I am not yet fluent enough in VMS to comment on their
>manuals.  Personally I'd rather have to wade through a lot of verbose
Can't say I'm that fluent either, however, at least when I login, I can
rely on being about to look up a manual page, and finding *most* of the
information I am looking for. Over here on our split campus site ( or rather
this departments here, rest university somewhere else ) I have access to
**one** DEC VAX manual - and thats not on VMS itself, but on various
"addon" applications ( I think the "DEC C" manual is there also ). Of course
it means signing it out, with deposit......
Also, I have yet to find a VMS related book *anywhere*, mind you, give our
library it's due, the Main Vaxcluster was only installed a year ago!
>
>>But really, there is one difference between VMS and Unix that is so
>>overwhelmingly important that it just can't be overemphasized, so
>>I'll repeat it: VMS is proprietary, Unix is not.
One thing to remember, VMS *IS* a competitor to UN*X, ask yourselve this 
question, would unixs' be as good if there wasn't a rival operating system.
The last thing any of us would want, is the dieing of VMS. We can still learn
lots from it ( How not to design a system??? :-)
As you've probably guessed from above, I'm quite impartial! I only use our
VaxCluster/VMS because no-one else does, and it's local terminal room is warm
and quiet!

ttfn Tim
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tim Wortley                JANET: wortley@uk.ac.hw.ee
Dept Elec & Elec Eng.       UUCP: uunet!mcvax!ukc!hwcs!hwee!wortley
Heriot-Watt Univ.           ARPA: wortley@ee.hw.ac.uk
Edinburgh, Scotland.          or: wortley%ee.hw.ac.uk@uk.ac.ucl.cs.nss