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Xref: sserve comp.os.misc:3661 comp.unix.misc:15407 comp.os.linux.misc:32793 comp.os.386bsd.misc:4666 Newsgroups: comp.os.misc,comp.unix.misc,comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.386bsd.misc Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!mel.dit.csiro.au!merlin!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msunews!agate!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!news.indirect.com!wes From: wes@indirect.com (Barnacle Wes) Subject: Re: VMS => WNT (was: Interested in PowerPC for Linux / FreeBSD / NetBSD?) Message-ID: <D1nMGE.9tw@indirect.com> Sender: usenet@indirect.com (Internet Direct Admin) Organization: the Briney (notso) Deep Date: Sat, 31 Dec 1994 02:48:14 GMT References: <3cilp3$143@news-2.csn.net> <dyue.788655868@femto> <MICHAELV.94Dec28203707@MindBender.HeadCandy.com> <D1Lrr1.Kn@murdoch.acc.virginia.edu> <D1Ltw2.FvJ@bonkers.taronga.com> X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2.1 [BP] PL2.1] Lines: 32 Somebody opined: > Dave Cutler has designed three OS's: RSX, VMS, NT. There's a common thread > running through all three; many ideas are common to all of them. Each, how- > ever, also has a flavor of "keep the good ideas of the old, throw out the > bad" - and add in important new things along the way. Peter da Silva (peter@bonkers.taronga.com) wrote: : Speaking as someone who went from TOPS-20 to UNIX and RSX to VMS and back : to UNIX, I much prefer RSX to VMS in many ways. A lot of the "new things" : added to VMS (and back-ported to RSX) were counterproductive, and some of : the stuff in RSX that was thrown out turned out to be really quite important. : Porting software from RSX to VMS occasionally ran into "you can't do that" : type walls. To do it justice, I'll say the same was true from RSX to UNIX, : but at least in UNIX the programs usually got a lot smaller, simpler, and : more general in the process, even if I had to give up good async I/O... and : nobody was claiming UNIX was a complete replacement for a realtime O/S like : RSX as they were for VMS. I agree. You can even throw in TOPS-10 on my pile, along with a smattering of other systems like Harris VOS and Concurrent (ne Interdata) OS/32. All have some good and some bad features, except for VOS, which was universally awful; Terry Lambert may disagree with this. (Terry, believe me, OS/32 is *much* better! ;^) I thought the idea in the move from RSX->VMS->WNT was to keep the bad ideas and throw out the good! No? Am I confused again? Keep in mind that UNIX inherited its feature set from Multics, and the idea there was to throw out 90% of the ideas and keep 10%, regardless of their relative merit, in order to make it fit on a PDP-7. ;^) Wes Peters