Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!amelia!msf From: msf@amelia.nas.nasa.gov (Michael S. Fischbein) Newsgroups: comp.os.vms Subject: Re: Help us defend against VMS! Message-ID: <386@amelia.nas.nasa.gov> Date: 24 Mar 88 13:44:25 GMT References: <2235@bsu-cs.UUCP> <892@cfa.cfa.harvard.EDU> <4236@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu> <375@amelia.nas.nasa.gov> <4454@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu> Reply-To: msf@amelia.nas.nasa.gov (Michael S. Fischbein) Organization: NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA Lines: 67 In article <4454@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu> davidli@umn-cs.UUCP (Dave Meile) writes: >In article <375@amelia.nas.nasa.gov> msf@amelia.nas.nasa.gov (Michael S. Fischbein) writes: >>You mean like Doug Comer and Xinu? Or Tannenbaum (I think) and MINIX? Or >>Rich Stallman and GNU? Or CMU and Mach? If you don't use AT&T source code, >>you don't pay AT&T. If you rewrote VMS, you wouldn't have to pay DEC >>any royalties either, except they would throw look and feel lawsuits at you. > >Umm... GNU stands for "GNU's Not UNIX". And, by definition, MINIX and Xinu >are not UNIX either. One of the original propositions was that "you can >easily transport between any system because it's all UNIX" -- well, if it >isn't all UNIX then the transport question seems moot. First, the named (royalty free) systems aren't UNIX for much the same reason Ultrix, HP-UX, UNICOS, SunOS, UTX, AIX, etc aren't ``UNIX:'' The word ``UNIX'' is a trademark of AT&T and they are the only ones who can, therefore, market a ``UNIX'' system. I call the others UNIX, as is common practice, to avoid circumlocutions like ``Operating system, utilities, and compilers that are source code compatible with the UNIX operating system originally developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories and since ported to a wide variety of computer architectures by a large number of researchers and vendors.'' > You can probably >port programs between GNU, MINIX, VMS, UNIX all with about the same amount >of blood, sweat and tears. Having done some of these ports from one to another of the ``Operating system, utilities, and compilers that are source code compatible with the UNIX operating system originally developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories and since ported to a wide variety of computer architectures by a large number of researchers and vendors,'' and to and from VMS I feel that I can report that porting C code, at least, to VMS is MUCH more difficult than going, say, from Silicon Graphics' GL3.5 to Cray's UNICOS. Or to Gould's UTX. Or, for that matter, to Xenix. We have non-trivial programs that run without any source code changes on systems from IBM-PCs to Macs to HP minis to Cray-2's. We have slightly more machine specific code (raw vs cooked mode, etc) that runs with no modifications but has a few ifdef's scattered about. They don't run on VMS. >My point -- you can't *call* these systems "UNIX systems". A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. >Given the fact that DEC's operating system is a standardized architecture, An OS is an architecture? Or does Ultrix run on a different architecture than VMS? >I doubt that anyone *could* rewrite VMS. But then again, I am assured that >standard code compiled on my MicroVAX II will run on the 8600 with which >it communicates. Yep. I also am assured that the code I compile on my Sun 3/140 will run on the Sun 3/280 with which it communicates. I can also take my source, recompile it, and run it on an HP, say, for better performance -- better performance at a lower price than that 8600. Or on a PC-AT for a cheaper, dedicated platform. Or on a Cray-2 for perfomance (and price) way above anything DEC offers. When VMS runs on both $1500 machines and 300 MFLOP machines with multiple vendor support (competitive procurement) it will be a viable alternative to UNIX. mike -- Michael Fischbein msf@ames-nas.arpa ...!seismo!decuac!csmunix!icase!msf These are my opinions and not necessarily official views of any organization.