Hacking OS sources

[God]

RE: Buying and hacking VMS sources...

I started to look into this to as we had some significant
misfeature problems under VMS, like no CBREAK mode
(ie. no XON/XOFF while passing chars reads, we want to
use things like EMACS over our flow controlled tty net.)

It seemed to me that:

	a) Yes, it is expensive but that's all relative.
	b) It's more than you think, as it is written
	in a few languages and you have to have and
	support all those languages just for this one
	purpose (eg. BLISS)
	c) I heard (tell me if I'm wrong) that a sysgen
	from source can take many many hours on a 780
	and basically requires all those to be standalone.
	(I guess we could call buying a spare 780 just
	another expense.)

In sum, the Turing Tarpit beckons, yes, you COULD do anything.
The real point is that VMS was never MEANT or DESIGNED to be
source supported by users as UNIX certainly is designed to be.

Similarly, you COULD put the VMS manuals on-line but they were
never designed to be on-line and would require something much
more sophisticated than the UNIX 'man' command to make it useful.

It's funny, TOPS-20 is widely source supported and the only thing
that seemed to kill it was DEC, certainly not the users or the
source sites. I am truly sorry VMS got off to such a bad start,
but denying it's historical legacy doesn't fix it.

			-Barry Shein