AT&T Joining OSF

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

In article <19709 at tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> mudd-j at pike.cis.ohio-state.edu (John R. Mudd) writes:
>In article <269 at quintus.UUCP> ok at quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>>In article <670025 at hpclscu.HP.COM> shankar at hpclscu.HP.COM (Shankar Unni) writes:
>>:How do you think IBM sells anything?  Product quality is usually priority 
>>:number 1 (like the Ford commercial :-)) at most of the big players in the
>>:business.
>>
>>Have you ever used VM/CMS?  Or its Pascal compiler?
>
>I may be putting my life and professional career on the line by saying this,
>but I *liked* VM/CMS from a user point-of-view.

I can see your point of view, I mean, 80-column records and tape drives
numbered in hexdecimal are so nostalgic (or kathedralgic, to coin a word).
But the topic was "Product quality", not "user interface".

I'm talking about ordinary user-level programs written in PL/I being able
to crash a user's virtual machine and trash a virtual disk on the way.
I'm talking about people having to rewrite their programs in SAS (yes, SAS)
because the Pascal compiler was, hmm, not a "priority number 1" program.
I'm talking about a site where the terminal concentrators crashed every
day and IBM's view was "tough luck, you should be using 3270s."
I'm talking about VSAM frequently reporting error numbers that weren't
in the manual.  And so on.  IBM have many strengths, and VM/CMS software
is no more flaky than a lot of other stuff, but it is nothing special
either.