Help us defend against VMS!

[Roy Smith]

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?

	Personally, I think VMS sucks and Unix is wonderful.  Judging from
the other recent responses, I'd say that is the majority opinion on the
net.  But (and it's a big But), remember that you are dealing with a very
strong self-selection factor.  Ask a bunch of unix wizards if Unix is
better than VMS and the answer will be pretty predictable.  I wonder if you
would get the same answer if you stood up at a DECUS meeting and asked the
same question?

	The strongest single factor that Unix has going for it (in my
opinion) is that it runs on zillions of different kinds of hardware.  We
used to run on pdp-11's and vaxes.  Now we run mostly on Suns.  Tommorow,
who knows?  Maybe we'll buy a Sequent or an Alliant.  Maybe PC's.  The
common theme is that they are all Unix, making porting program and user
skills orders of magnitude easier than moving from one OS to another each
time we change vendors.

	Up until recently, the biggest reason I could think of to have VMS
is because lots of other people do; we get a lot of big VMS FORTRAN
programs which will only run on VMS because they depend on VMS extensions.
We were seriously thinking of buying a small Vax to run VMS on just for
those applications.  What we have done instead is order Sun's VMS
compatable FORTRAN compiler so we can run that VMS FORTRAN on our Unix
boxes and have the best of both worlds.

	Before committing to VMS, find out if it supports NFS (Sun's
Network File System), TCP/IP, and NeWS and/or X.  If it supports all those
(and supports them well, without resorting to third-party software add-ons)
then you should not have too much trouble integrating into the rest of the
world.  VMS almost certainly doesn't support uucp, but this can probably be
considered as much of a blessing as a curse.
-- 
Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016