Posted on 01/10/2006 10:17:04 AM PST by SirLinksalot
that's pretty much the size of it, okay.
I ran a PDP 11/70.
After years of running 360's and 370's with a variety of OS's.
It was like the MAC vs. PC's. Everything on the PDP was intuitive, and the computer did the work, not you.
The text editor (EDT) was so far above and beyond editors on IBM mainframes it was like being given a gift (when writing programs). EDT was, in many ways, far superior to any of today's WORD processing programs.
DEC's manuals were truly manuals made to learn from.
IBM's manuals are made to obfuscate and cause phone calls to highly paid consultants.
The DEC's operated in byte mode, instead of block mode for terminal communications, and you could not move the cursor to a position on the screen that was not a valid data entry position. On the IBM, you can, and if you hit enter, it locks the screen. Why allow the cursor in non data areas ?
What my experience has taught me is that there are good computers and popular computers. There are good programmers, and there are straight line coders.
Most programmers have no idea how a computer really operates, and therefore usually make only passable programmers.
Most people 'love' IBM and various softwares, because it's all they've ever used. Only those who have used better know better.
One of the CE's told me an interesting story. I repeat this because of the current state of the art in VOICE RENDERING available for PC users.
I had both PC's and MAC's for my use and adminstrated the setup/installation/training for all employees where I worked.
The MAC had a program that would READ any type text file. Email, word processing, didn't matter.
AND IT WAS PRETTY GOOD AT IT.
But, what surprised me was that the DEC CE, when I showed him this, told me that when I call in for service I was not talking to a human. I was talking to a VAX.
The VOICE program on the MAC was good, beyond today's PC programs, but not anywhere near as good as the VAX voice I talked to. I never had any idea it wasn't a real person until he told me.
The only sitting on the hill I remember is the one that was on one side of the football stadium. I never sat back there...not like there was much reason to go to the football games in the mid-'80s anyhow, except to watch Charles Haley play.
}:-)4
A bit slow but I know of 2 RS Commodore 64s still plugging along.
<<<<
And as for the hardware miracles of the Alpha architecture, you can find some of its magic in AMD's Opteron processors. They inherited much of the insanely fast bus architecture and 64-bit goodness of the Alpha.
>>>>
I think HP might have made a mistake staking the future of VMS on the ITANIUM instead of Opteron...
Ah yeah, good ol' EDT, my main editor in college. Simple, straightforward, not hard to learn.
And then came EVE. EVE was a hell of an editor. I used it when most of my classmates were still on EDT, because EVE was a lot more powerful and flexible if you were willing to put in the time to learn it (and I had a lot of boring downtime on the help desk). I liked using EVE.
Then after a few years on IBMs with TSO/ISPF, I ended up in a Unix shop...using vi. I'm still scarred for life.
}:-)4
I can't run Prairie Dog Hunter on my XP box...I sure do miss that game...
As the old axiom said, "Nobody was ever fired for buying IBM."............
Steve L
May 21 2004, 12:49 pm show options
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
From: Steve L - Find messages by this author
Date: Fri, 21 May 2004 13:49:19 -0400
Local: Fri, May 21 2004 12:49 pm
Subject: Re: Dave Cutler and VMS
Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Report Abuse
On Fri, 21 May 2004 02:06:23 GMT, JF M wrote:
>Steve L wrote:
>> Cutler left VMS in 1980 before version 2.0 was released, and was not further
>> involved with the VMS OS development.
>That article alludes to the fact that Cutler left Digital at VMS 5.0, making
>it look to the microsoft weenies that Cutler was still involved with VMS.
I know. There seems to be a strong tendency to embellish Cutler's involvement with VMS as we know it today. His involvement with VAXELN is also missing from most of the chronologies I have read. If one looks at the original high-level design of NT, with separate subsystems and message-passing, it is almost a carbon-copy of VAXELN. As with VAXELN (and VAX PL/I and VAX C), it took several years and lots of engineers to actually make NT work, with the "elegance" of the separate subsystems replaced by the practicality of more tightly-coupled code.
Cutler was very heavily involved in the kernel design for VMS 1.0, though a lot of it looked like RSX-11D (no surprise.) He kept the role of project manager through 1979 and perhaps partly into 1980, and then left to do PL/I.
My personal view is that Cutler does not deserve all the credit he is given for VMS. I consider the contributions of visionaries such as Tom Hastings, Dick Hustvedt, Peter Conklin and others to be of at least equal, if not greater importance. They're the ones who kept an eye on the future and made sure that VMS had the architectural foundation it needed to succed in the long term. Otherwise, it would be just a 32-bit RSX. Consider the "common language environment", something pretty much unheard of back in 1977 (or since then, for that matter.) VMS is one of the few significant operating systems where there is a (mostly) level playing field for programming languages, and common calling conventions. Tom Hastings deserves most of the credit for that.
I don't want to minimize Cutler's contributions - they were significant. But I don't feel he quite deserves the "Father of VMS" label that is so often applied to him.
Steve
DECtalk.
That's not an accident. C was intended to a portable assembly language and was created by people who started life writing assembler on PDP8/11 computers. I used an early cut of UNIX written in assembler for the COSMOS support system. It was called "COSNIX". A real time variant of that COSNIX was created for automatic call distributors. It was called MERT. Dennis Ritchie's invention of C turned out to be very useful across a broad range of assemblers and CPU architectures.
From what I've been able to gather, the Itanic architecture places all the performance work on the compiler, and so far it has proven extremely difficult to create compilers that generate the speed.
Mass-market forces continue to propel the humble lil' 8088 architecture and its offspring far beyond what their technical capabilities would ever have predicted. :-) Nearly every other CPU architecture is better; none have been able to beat it in the marketplace.
i still believe it was an attempted immitation of VMS reguardless of who created VMS... even the name was a kind of in "Joke" like HAL was to IBM. the letters preceding IBM are HAL... WNT are the letters following VMS. coincidence??? 8^)
But again, NT doesn't have 96 nodes in a [shared-everything] cluster and 800KM between nodes.
I wake up every morning and thank God that I don't support Windows systems for a living.
Again, guys, there's a hobbyist program- join ENCOMPASS (associate memberships are free), grab some hardware off of eBay, get hobbyist licenses (also free) and surf without worrying about viruses.
NASA facilities everywhere. The launch control center at Kennedy.
There are even PDP-8s in use on scavenged parts.
My company still supports and writes Client software for Open/VMS systems. Many are still in use at the enterprise level.
I keep a PDP-8 card on my shelf at home to remember the good old days. We transitioned from PDP-8 to PDP-11 when I worked at Signetics.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.