VMS is UNIX spelled backwards (almost)

[Geoff Kuenning]

In article <378 at hou2g.UUCP> mikec at hou2g.UUCP (Michael Condict) writes:

>Those VMS-ites who enjoy denigrating UNIX should show some respect.  Virtually
>every feature in the early versions of VMS that made it useable (barely!) was
>copied from UNIX -- this is well known within the original development group,
>which was headed by a UNIX-lover (gasp, gasp!).

The way I remember it (I was in the 11M group at the time) is that Dave Cutler
headed the VMS group.  He was a tried-and-true Deccie, the author of 11M, and
not what I would call a UNIX-lover.  I also remember the name of Peter
somebody (can anybody help me?).  I cannot believe that a true-blue UNIX
lover at the head of the VMS group could have produced anything so hard to
use, even given the influence of various committees and other groups within
DEC.

>In fact, Version 1.0 of VMS was ... apparently designed by concatenating
>the RSX-11M ... manuals with the UNIX Version 7 manuals, then ... deleting a
>few pages.  I guess the idea was to be upward compatible with RSX while
>putting in all the UNIX goodies as well.  Here are a few examples for your
>amusement:

I think you give them too much credit.  RSX-11M compatibility *was* a
specific goal, and some people had read a few UNIX manuals.  There probably
were a few peon-level UNIX-lovers around too, but they didn't have much
influence.  That's probably why it wound up the way it did -- UNIX ideas
got interpreted by people who had never seen UNIX, and so they didn't
understand which parts were the important one.

>o They saw the utility of a command processor as powerful and flexible as the
>  Bourne shell, so they tried to put one in VMS.  Unfortunately, what they
>  ended up with (DCL) was an interpreter for, roughly, a subset of FORTRAN.
>  Whoopee!

DCL was (is?) a committee product, was strongly influenced by the need to
hang it on top of both TOPS-20 and RSX, by the existing IAS command interface,
and by the RSX-11M "indirect processor".  The design of this last was motivated
largely by the RSX-11M sysgen upgrade project.  If there was Bourne shell
influence in the first DCL spec I saw, it was sure well hidden.

[I am going to leave out several things I agree with wholeheartedly]

>o Tree-structured file systems are wonderful...[but the syntax is the]
>  elegant notation  "DB0:[USER.GLERP]WHATEVER.FTN;13"...

To be fair, this is partly because RSX-11M had tree-structured file systems.
"WHAT?" you say, "This guy's *nuts*."  Actually not.  I went to put
tree-structured file systems in 11M (the file system is implemented largely
in a user-mode library, so it's remarkable what a person with sources can
do without touching the kernel).  Imagine my surprise when I discovered that
most of the work was in removing restrictive checks for recursive directory
references.  It was obvious that the person who did it originally had heard
of directory trees and had left the hooks all over the place.

For those of you who have never had the misfortune to use 11M:  I have often
praised its real-time performance and marketplace success.  But the human
interface -- you thought UNIX had a wierd, non-intuitive, inconsistent
human interface?  You ain't seen nothing yet until you've seen:

PIP DB0:[101,124]ALPHA.DAT/NV/ME=DK1:[123,321]BETA.TXT;3,.DOC;7,;9,.C;*,GAMMA

(say what?)

(For you innocent unbloodied ones:  that's

cat /usr/joe/beta.{txt,doc*,c*} /usr/joe/gamma.c* >/usr/mary/alpha.dat

assuming you keep old versions in .co and .doco, or some such. At least you
could put blanks in for readability if you had room [80-character input
buffers, you know..])
-- 

	Geoff Kuenning
	...!ihnp4!trwrb!desint!geoff