🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <7OCT199210492045@carat.arizona.edu>, jms@carat.arizona.edu (A virtually vegetal non-entity) writes:

> about flaming, and technical info, and Ehud's last message ...

In fact, I found Ehud's message to be a flame worth keeping around.

At MIT we used to call something with the right tone and technical 
content a "FLAME."

If there was not sufficient technical content then the thing
would not even be -elevated- to deserve the term "flame" and
instead would be considered mere whining, or worse.

----------

Flame:

The real problem today is that there is no technical respect for
operating systems, period. Of what benefit would it have been
to DIGITAL to make VMS truly call-oriented across all functionalities
at the DCL level (that is, there would no longer be -any- "executable"
files that are activated by the RUN command, instead every functionality
invoked by the command interpreter would come from essentially a kind
of LINK/SHARE'd object, and there would be a more general kind
of LIB$FIND_IMAGE_SYMBOL with the ability to deactivate images no
longer needed). In short, give us something of Multics circa 1975, only
better?

Would that have helped in DIGITAL in the marketplace? 
Is Microsoft "NT" going provide something like that?

All the emphasis is on the features of the SUBSYSTEM or worse, the
graphical user interface. 

And heck, if you are good enough, and can make kernel mods if needed,
you can get just about any kind of application subsystem running
in anything, even UNIX.

A possible exception to this flame might be the IBM AS-400 system. 
Now perhaps IBM was willing to invest in making the base operating 
system provide better functionality in areas such as dynamic linking and object
management because the extra complexity of such a thing makes
it a lot more difficult to reverse engineering and connect into,
in addition to enforcing a certain quality and consistency
in all applications that are done in the environment provided.

Obviously another big exception to this is all the volume shadowing
and vaxcluster and other stuff associated with VMS. That kind of thing
goes a long way to making the operating system responsible for providing
a consistent and robust environment in which an application can run.
But still, it isn't as iron-clad automatic and unavoidable as what
was available in old Multics or AS-400 land.

But then again, all this could be provided in the SUBSYSTEM itself.
e.g. private journalling and backup activities in a database implementation.

-gjc