Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!ncar!gatech!ukma!psuvm.bitnet!cunyvm!unknown From: rrk@byuvax.bitnet Newsgroups: comp.os.vms Subject: Re: Help us defend against VMS! Message-ID: <90rrk@byuvax.bitnet> Date: 5 Mar 88 11:03:46 GMT Lines: 161 How did this rot get here? I admit I have probably written similar inacruacies about unix (Eunuchs?) systems in my day, and will probably do more in the future, but this writer doesn't know much about VMS on the inside. Some of his points are based on correct facts, but are a very narrow view, while others are just plain wrong or ignorant. VMS is single hardware architecture and operating system. That is it's great strength. That is why it is not a mess of add-ons and doing things with an already out of shape architecture. Anyone who has followed DEC knows that if DEC takes a new direction, just about everything follows and it affects the system at all levels. Old things become "jacket" routines which call the new, and everything follows the new scheme. DEC has done many things with their architecture that UNIX will never do, because UNIX really wasn't designed. It just kind of happened. We can follow up with specific examples, if you like, but I noticed that the original article didn't bother in its many pages. VMS most definately does not lock you into an architecture or a hardware. I know of no OS that communicates with others like VMS. I would suspect that VMS communicates with Unix as well or better than many other unix's. There are many network configurations for bringing in DOS PC's and other strange animals that I've never heard of in the PC world. I run WordPerfect under VMS and DOS. I can use its file manager (last time I tried) to list files accross DECNET on a unix machine, or on the hard drive or floppy of my PC. I can make a VMS drive look like a hard drive on my PC's and I can save a document on my PC and then use a DCL command to send it directly to a print queue where VMS will pass control to WordPerfect routines which will translate the document for the destination queue it happens to print on--which may not be determined until long after the user logs off and may be on another node of the VAX cluster. Cerrtainly once you start using VMS you will become dependant on it for all the things that the other O/S's don't give you. If this is what you meant when you said you are locked into it, then I agree. But VMS doesn't lock you into one O/S, although I can see how you might have assumed this coming from the UNIX world where you are locked into one O/S. If you really want to, you can put UNIX on half of your machines until people voluntarily stop using it and defer to VMS. From what I have seen of UNIX running on a VAX, it consumes much more system overhead than VMS, so the higher VMS price is at least partially justified. If you spend half a million on new hardware, do you want to save a few thousand dollars on your O/S and have it eat half your investment? There would be no problem with running UNIX on your non-VAX equipment. Yes, the software for VMS is more expensive and unbundled, but if I were counting on something being supported and upgraded and improved, I would go for the one with the price tag every time. Sure, there are PD compilers out there for VMS as well, some of them quite good, but if you want the good one, development usually isn't done for free. I believe you will find the VMS fortran that you pay for compatible and fast. As far as the communities "rapidly switching to UNIX", as far as it goes on VAX's, the existing base of VAX's is (last time I checked) 60% VMS, 40% UNIX. The new VAX's being shipped are about 80% VMS, 20% UNIX. I suppose this could be reconciled if it could be shown that such communities were a relatively small segment of the market, or that they were steering away from VAX's in general. I'm not in a position to know that. I program heavily in assembly language, and know that the code produced by the "C" compilers is very inadequate--even under UNIX. I have helped optimize it for students on several occasions. It is the design of "C" that procludes lots of optimization that I consider important. Maybe that's why the O/S doesn't stack up next to VMS. I work on a major program which is being ported to most machines known to man, and the UNIX implementation will never be what the VMS one is, because the UNIX environment is not well defined. Yes, get a list of these applications that run on the VAX. Try the newest VMS software sourcebook for just a beginning. They are not useless. The only major thing is that they are sometimes expensive, but many cannot be had or can only be had in mutilated forms under UNIX, due to the great lack of hardware or O/S integrity under UNIX. DEC has realized the error of their ways. Xwindows will be an integral part of VMS 5.0 which will be released soon. It's funny, all the new and innovative things I've seen run only under VMS. The things usually requested from the UNIX world are utilities like MORE, for UNIX users who haven't learned how to get around under VMS. MORE is nice (although a bit cryptic from what I've seen) but is a long ways behind what I would call "new" or "innovative" watch this list for such requests. But why argue... for those who want UNIX, let there be UNIX, and for those who want the O/S to do all the mundane things for them and leave them free for more creative pursuits, so that they don't have to reinvent indexed files and other things like interfaces and specialized utilities every time they want to use them for something new, let there be VMS. They cryptic comments about a study of the O/S's are just an ignorant apology for the lack of the well-defined and implemented features which UNIX doesn't have and if it ever does, it will be because it copied DEC's O/S as in the past. True enough, the VMS sources are only available under a special license (about $30,000 last time I checked). Interesting, isn't it then, how all the best software is being written for the VAX. You don't have to modify, or even read the source code to be able to use the O/S. Do you ask the manufacturer of a spreadsheet for the sources so that you can run it? Or how about an editor, or other utilities. No. You want documentation. VMS documentation generally suffices. The VMS sources would fill many disks and be unmanageable. That's why documentation was written. Routines are supposed to have nice interfaces. The online VMS help on a normal VMS system (not tailored out of size considerations) gives fairly detailed information on every parameter to every common system service and run-time library routine. Using this information, someone familiar with VMS documentation conventions (yes, under VMS we have conventions) can call any of these system services or routines. You can extract system structure or constant information from system libraries. If the UNIX documentation were as large and complete as the complete VMS documentation, I doubt there would be room for it on disk eithe, althoough you can order complete documentation on-line, but you'd better order more disks. This is a real operating system and a thorough documentation. Any decent documentation will provide you with user-level examples, and not refer you to the sources for examples. Obviously UNIX documentation must require that. As for being able to modify VMS, the reason why DEC sat down before hand and designed VMS was so that there would only have to be one VMS which satisfies everyones needs. When you modify the basic UNIX to try to make up for its inadequacies, you just complicate things. When you use a nice hook to add to or customize VMS, you use something well defined which will work with future O/S releases, and will not hamper the use of the O/S functions by other programs not written with the modification in mind. VMS is more secure by far than UNIX. The reason that people get really excited about any discovered holes is that VMS, unlike UNIX (just ask the government why they can't use UNIX where they can use VMS because UNIX is insecure) is presumed to be totally secure. Thinking that banks are less worried about security than university campus's indicates, I believe, a loose screw, as do the suggestions that being able to granularly define exactly what a user may and may not do without giving away the store is less secure than only having one privilege bit -- all or nothing. The references to the programming interfaces just don't resemble fact in the slihtest. I really feel embarassed about having responded at all to such uninformed rantings. Yes, UNIX documetation is cheap, but you apparently can't even use it without the source-code. If your campus hasn't gone VMS, why would there be doc's in the bookstore? There are reference cards and beginners books for about every aspect of VMS, as well as on-line tutorials, the likes of which I've never seen under UNIX. The architecture manual on my desk was printed last year. It is obvious that old books would exist in a stagnant environment. Take a list at the digital press book list. I'm getting tired of this... I don't know how many more pages of stuff there is that I haven't directly addressed, but most of it is just bias and user preference. Yes, there are valid reasons for having archaic things like UNIX around. Is everyone suddenly going to throw aray their PC's? No. But I can think of a few UNIX machines they might abandon when there is enough VMS to go around and enough documentation, etc. All the UUCP and usenet I've ever seen has been on a VMS VAX. DECNET doesn't preclude these. I must have missed the "factual basis" in all of the "myriad" strewn throughout the original comments. UNIX is no standard. So we can choose from either DOS, or whatever the MAC runs or VMS.