Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: running VAX-unix binaries under VAX
Message-ID: <9918@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 24 Mar 89 15:31:30 GMT
References: <621@asuvax.asu.edu> <59300006@mcdurb>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 12

In article <59300006@mcdurb> aglew@mcdurb.Urbana.Gould.COM writes:
>A VMS emulator, on the other hand, would have to start from scratch;
>I doubt that DEC would sell the code.

Coming from a Gould (DEC competitor) employee, this smacks a bit of
unfairness.  Unless DEC has radically changed their policy since I
looked into this several years ago, VMS source can be licensed and
its cost is of the same order of magnitude as an initial UNIX source
license.  However, much of the VMS system (at least back when I had
access to it) was coded in macro assembler and BLISS, which makes
porting it considerably more difficult than porting UNIX which as we
all know is written almost entirely in C.