Unix Bugs vs. VMS bugs

[boyle at ANL-MCS.ARPA]

Let me second Mike Muuss's comments about Standard Vendor Support.  For
years (before obtaining Unix), I lived with IBM's support.  Bug fixes
toke 9-18 months to receive; by that time, who cares?  There were
stupid performance bugs (that sold systems, no doubt), such as the PL/I
memory allocation routine that searched the free list for an optimally
sized fragment, but didn't stop when it found an exact match!  

Perhaps the worst problem was that we received the weekly bug fix tapes
Mike described, but dared not install any that didn't address problems
that we had not experienced--many, perhaps most, of the fixes broke
something else.  A result of this is that several times I spent time
chasing a bug and working out a demo case, only to be told "IBM has a
fix for that, but we didn't install it".  Now who's wasting time?

Finally, this supported software was not reliable.  I think we averaged
at least one software-caused crash per day.

I'll take Unix, preferrably with a small vendor whom I can call on the
telephone, any day.

			Jim Boyle
			Math and Comp Sci Div
			Argonne Nat'l Lab