VMS is not the evil empire

[Ron Kleinman]

In article <10009 at steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP> dawn!stpeters at steinmetz.UUCP (Dick St.Peters) writes:
>In article <2528 at pdn.UUCP> reggie at pdn.UUCP (George W. Leach) writes:
>>      Well when I was with Bellcore our lab utilized Ultrix 1.0 on some
>>VAX 780's.  ...
>>
>>      Now, of course all that has changed and it was their first attempt at
>>UNIX, ...
>It was more like their zero'th attempt.  When we got Ultrix 1.0, we
>bought source - and paid a bundle for it.  It looked a bit familiar -
>in fact, it was essentially identical to the BSD 4.2 source we already
>had.  After dozens of diffs, the only difference I ever found was in
>the kernel source: DEC had replaced one BSD macro with a procedure.
>

Seconded.  When we got that version of Ultrix, I tried out the "finger"
command, and was informed by this DEC operating system that the
location I was giving was illegal, as it wasn't in Evans or Colby
Hall (I think I've got that right .. this was awhile ago) which were
apparently located on the Berkeley campus.  I reported the problem and
it went away with the next release.

>Management bought installation, but when the FE showed up to do the
>install, we already had Ultrix running.  Good thing too, 'cuz the FE
>had never installed it.
>

Worse .. they had to reboot VMS to run any diagnostics that first release.
We had a disk problem which didn't show under VMS.  The big difference
was in attitude ... when BSD4.2 did it, the DEC people yawned, when
Ultrix showed the problem they at least sounded concerned.

>However, DEC has come a long way since then, and instead of bashing
>them for taking so long to get on the UNIX bandwagon, shouldn't we be
>welcoming them aboard?
>

Seconded.  They've added some nice features to Unix, DECnet being one
of them.
>--
>Dick St.Peters                        
>GE Corporate R&D, Schenectady, NY
>stpeters at ge-crd.arpa              
>uunet!steinmetz!stpeters