Help us defend against VMS!

[Bill.Stewart.<ho95c>]

:In article <1636 at tulum.UUCP> hirai at swatsun.uucp (Eiji "A.G." Hirai) writes:
:>	Is VMS as horrible as I suspect or am I alone an thinking this?
:>Please help shed the light for us!  Please tell us what you think would be
:>reasons why you wouldn't buy VMS! (or why you would). 
	VMS may be evil, but it's not stupid (unlike IBM operating systeems.)
	The major difference is probably that UNIX is a development
	environment, while VMS is a production environment.
	Also, as Barry Shein points out, UNIX software can be used
	everywhere; VMS software is only useful on VAXen and a few
	VMS-imitators (some of the mini-supers).  While UNIX does have
	portability problems, after any VMS version upgrade you can
	*hear* the applications breaking.

	There are features of VMS that I wish UNIX had (file versioning, batch
	process control, decent Fortran libraries), but you don't have
	as much flexibility for developing new software - and you
	could add these things to UNIX if you wanted; if you think
	adding real UNIX capability to VMS is easy, look at EUNICE and
	think some more.

	UNIX is a better environment for learning about computer
	systems, developing tools for non-computer problems,
	and generally having a good time.  You should keep some VMS
	systems around - partly to expose your students to other
	systems, partly to let your fortran grinders grind fortran
	(though DEC may provide VMS fortran on ULTRIX as well as VMS).

In article <68 at musky2.MUSKINGUM.EDU> terrell at musky2.UUCP (Roger Terrell) writes:
:We have both UNIX and VMS here at Muskingum, and my experience is that both
:VMS ADVANTAGES:
:   - VMS is *friendly*; more so than any flavor of UNIX
	Yuk!  VMS HELP is friendly, and VMS commands are a bit more
	consistent than UNIX's, but everything is so Clunky!
	Each level of a directory looks different, half the commands
	feel like JCL, and you can't just pop up a process to do
	something when you want it.  I suppose the one other
	friendliness feature it has is DCL command-line editing,
	but I've used ksh long enough I've forgotten that vanilla sh
	users don't have it :-)

:   - the Run-time library that comes with VMS is extremely powerful and
:is getting better still in the upcoming version of VMS (5.0).
	If you leave aside math libraries (which VMS does very well)
	I'd say UNIX does better.  Some UNIX versions have shared
	libraries (which I assume VMS provides); these are a big win.

:   - VMS is much more secure, although this does not mean much in an
	Most of its security comes through obscurity, or through
	setting all the defaults to secure values.  A tightly
	administered UNIX system can be just about secure, and *if you
	don't like things you can fix them* (well, assuming you've got
	source.)  The recent NASA SPAN breakins were because a major
	VMS security bug was discovered (heck, the ink on the C-2
	certification was hardly dry!) and it took DEC *months* to get
	around to installing the fix in Europe.
:   - The DEC compilers are VERY nice.
	Yep.
:   - VMS documentation blows UNIX documentation out of the water (someone 
	No.  VMS documentation blows V7 documentation out the water,
	at least for tutorial purposes.  If you want user-friendly
	documentation, AT&T can probably out-weigh VMS documentation.
	But if you want to find something quickly, UNIX docs are better.
	(Admittedly, VMS HELP covers the equivalent of most of the
	things I look up  in the manual.)
:   - The editors on VMS (TPU especially) are quite powerful.
	Foo.  Look at most Emacsen.  (I use vi, personally.)

:   - The UNIX shell "languages" are much better than DCL.
	This is largely because:
:   - UNIX has better facilities to deal with programs which use
:more than one process.
	and
:   - Many text-oriented tools are available.

:   - UNIX has UUCP (and, therefore, Usenet) ** major plus here ** 
	A mixed blessing, but it has its uses.
-- 
#				Thanks;
# Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs 2G218, Holmdel NJ 1-201-949-0705 ihnp4!ho95c!wcs
# So we got out our profilers and debuggers and editors and various other
# implements of destuction and went off to clean up the tty driver...