A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
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A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
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Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#2We had to use VAX/VMS when I was a freshman, decades ago. The “Computer Center” had dozens of VT220s hooked up to it via serial “hubs” in the main building basement (the very stereotype of a nerd dungeon).
It wasn’t half bad. As multi-user systems went, it was actually quite good and we ran a number of projects on it before moving off to PCs, Sun Workstations and Linux in general.
I remember all the staples of the era: using Kermit to upload our assignments to the thing, dialing in from home at 2400bps, hacking our way “out” to the Internet, running out of our 50MB quota due to mailing-lists and uuencoded files fetched via mail gateways.
It was a lot of fun, and AFAIK there are some working VMS emulators around that I could install on a Raspberry Pi (and likely get a faster multi-user system than what we had then for hundreds of students).
I say it was an experience worth having, but largely (functionally) indistinguishable from a UNIX machine when accessing it via teletype (glass or otherwise).
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#3Key quote for me :
> Actually, the answer is easy. Operating systems cost hardware manufacturers, and therefore consumers (us), money. Unix is free, and whatever its defects at least no one blames the hardware manufacturers
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#4We had to use VAX/VMS when I was a freshman, decades ago. The “Computer Center” had dozens of VT220s hooked up to it via serial “hubs” in the main building basement (the very stereotype of a nerd dungeon). It wasn’t half bad. As multi-user systems went, it was actually quite good and we ran a number of projects on it before moving off to PCs, Sun Workstations and Linux in general. I remember all the staples of the er…
> largely (functionally) indistinguishable from a UNIX machine
Although they were functionally similar, there were some practical considerations...
I will say that path names in unix were a simple and elegant , compared to what VMS used.
I recall VMS paths were something like [foo.bar.bletch]something.txt
At the time this was a little cumbersome, but looking back it is much worse.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#5We had to use VAX/VMS when I was a freshman, decades ago. The “Computer Center” had dozens of VT220s hooked up to it via serial “hubs” in the main building basement (the very stereotype of a nerd dungeon). It wasn’t half bad. As multi-user systems went, it was actually quite good and we ran a number of projects on it before moving off to PCs, Sun Workstations and Linux in general. I remember all the staples of the er…
> but largely (functionally) indistinguishable from a UNIX machine when accessing it via teletype (glass or otherwise).
I disagree. I first sat down at a VMS terminal in a library in North Carolina when the OPAC broke and dropped me back to a prompt. I knew Linux passably well at that point but had never used VMS before.
I typed ls, tried dir, that worked, and finally tried help. In half an hour I was investigating the university's network. It was a remarkably easy system to get oriented on. Conversely, no one can be expected to get anything vaguely comparable when sitting down unattended at a unix shell for twenty minutes.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#6We had to use VAX/VMS when I was a freshman, decades ago. The “Computer Center” had dozens of VT220s hooked up to it via serial “hubs” in the main building basement (the very stereotype of a nerd dungeon). It wasn’t half bad. As multi-user systems went, it was actually quite good and we ran a number of projects on it before moving off to PCs, Sun Workstations and Linux in general. I remember all the staples of the er…
> largely (functionally) indistinguishable from a UNIX machine Although they were functionally similar, there were some practical considerations... I will say that path names in unix were a simple and elegant , compared to what VMS used. I recall VMS paths were something like [foo.bar.bletch]something.txt At the time this was a little cumbersome, but looking back it is much worse.
Yeah, hence the “functionally”. SYS$[HOMES](something username) was weird as heck, but it worked largely the same way.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#7The complaints here don't seem to be much about how Unix works in a deep way, but rather the particular language/syntax which is used to interact with it ("rm", etc.). While that's certainly annoying in many ways, so are almost all languages in common use. You could write a lot about how horrible English is (or German, as Mark Twain famously did). But English is a useful standard - politics, inertia, and the value of a common language are forces far stronger than the fact that the language is more annoying than it could be.
Am I being trolled? Probably :(
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#8The last modified header suggests (2000)
Last-Modified: Fri, 08 Dec 2000 14:02:09 GMTRe: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#9 "Anyway, have you ever tried to use man? It's fine as long as you know what you are looking for. How would you ever find out the name of command given just the function you wanted to execute? You can't. "
One of my gripes with UNIX systems is how opaque they are
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#10à propos means apt/appropriate as a noun in french and in English, but the phrase « à propos de … » means “about …” ; which is much more (wait for it) à propos. It is kind of weird that it was used in Unix wherein only the noun form made sense ; and even with french in mind the “apropos ” syntax (without « de ») makes it sound weird. In practice I don't think I've ever used it, and when I was a noob I often lamented the lack of a high-level documentation of Linux which would introduce the appropriate man/info pages.