why learn UNIX

[cetron at utah-cs.UUCP]

In article <3700002 at hpfcph.HP.COM> dalem at hpfcph.HP.COM ( Dale McCluskey) writes:

>Two comments.  First, while UNIX manuals aren't designed with beginners in
>mind, they DO tell you a great deal that you will have trouble finding in
>VMS manuals - file formats, for instance.  Second, UNIX is a fairly open 
>system that encourages experimenting.  This is aided by the information   
>available in the manuals.

	hmm, I seem to remember seeing file formats, data representations, and
lots of other goodies in my manual set....and at least the vms guides tell you
exactly what the program will do (ever try to actually figure out how to use
badsect or bad144 from their manual pages????)
	And lets face it, to really experiment you have to read the code
anyway for both systems :-)

>
>It is also very  flexible.  An example of this is that one could write a
>shell that would run on UNIX and look like DCL (VMS's shell),  but you
>would have a pretty tough time doing the reverse.

	funny, I know of now dcl shells for unix, but I know of two vms
'shells' which emulate unix (including pipes, redirection...) and only
one of the two is from dec (the other is public domain) and at least two
full unix emulators (more than just the shell, libraries, system calls, etc)
for vms - has anyone yet seen a vms emulator for unix ???  :-)

-ed cetron
center for engineering design
cetron%utah-ced at utah-cs.arpa
cetron at ced.utah.edu
cetron at utahcca.bitnet