🚀 go-pugleaf

In <61209@mimsy.umd.edu> hoel@umiacs.umd.edu writes:

> I recently had a very heated discussion with a peer concerning the relative
> strengths and weaknesses of VAXes and workstations, as well as VMS and UNIX.

I have many of these same heated debates.

> Although my personal knowledge of these two topics is limited, I do feel that
> each must offer various advantages relative to each other otherwise they
> would have died off long ago.  My friend on the other hand was vehament in
> his assertions that both workstations and unix were clearly superior...


I'm actually getting more excepting of Un*x.  I like the way the command recall
is set-up in ksh.  I like the faster boxes.  My likes are limited because many
of the same tools can be found on VMS in public domain ( grep, sed, flex ).  
Now with the posix shell you actually have all these features albeit slow.
However, piping is a cool Un*x feature.  With that said let me say that VMS
is much more management oriented (security, monitoring, auditing) and has
a file system that is *the best* AND a memory system that is excellent.  I
enjoy tuning (SYSGEN, UAF, etc.) and most Unices do not have near the 
tuning capabilities.  BUT AIX has alot of tuning tools available and manages
memory differently (and better) than others.  So you can see that some of them 
are getting much more robust (the AIX stack of manuals is nearly as tall as 
VMS!!).  

But now lets talk about direction...
Digital realized that VMS would die (so to speak) if it didn't change.  What
they are doing (have done) is:

		1)  Changing licensing/pricing of VMS
		2)  Alpha (lifesaver)
		3)  Incorporating standards (Posix, etc.)
		4)  Opening VMS up to other vendors (no takers yet)

Like a politician that cares to survive, DEC and VMS are changing.  

We expect that our application will actually be in demand on a VMS box next
year when a similarly priced and configured RS/6000 is much slower and the 
editor is a drag.  :-)

				Rob

                                                     young@tattoo.cs.widener.edu
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists
 in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore all progress depends 
  on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw