From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!G:cliff Newsgroups: net.cms Title: Re: CP PER, Student CMS, Batch, Etc. Article-I.D.: populi.172 Posted: Fri May 14 11:05:39 1982 Received: Sat May 15 03:44:46 1982 Actually, Waterloo's Student CMS is a special CMS that requires HEAVY modifications to CP to run. So it can't really be compared to a class of students using almost unmodified CMS. I was surprised to hear that someone feels strongly about CMS over UNIX. My experience is that UNIX provides a far nicer environment to work in, but I have to use CMS to do things that UNIX doesn't provide, such as SPSS or any of a multitude of packages not running on UNIX. Let's do a survey (if anyone is interested in this group this will certainly show it), of what people like about UNIX over CMS or vice-versa. To start: Nice things about UNIX totally unavailable on CMS: A file system. I/O redirection and pipes. I can't believe that there are operating systems being designed today that don't have this. CMS' excuse is it's extreme old age... Things that CMS does better: Lots of software available (most of the good stuff not from IBM). Better system security in that there are no 'priveleged' programs floating around. Password security is always lousy on any system... Runs on faster systems. Editors tend to not be CPU intensive because they rely on smart terminals. (Note that the editors are pretty bad though). Virtual Machine nice for much testing. More about UNIX: Program maintanence tools. Word processing stuff that is wonderful, especially when compared to the IBM stuff. Vi or Emacs editor. Xedit and Edgar are fine for many programming applications, but fall flat on their faces when faced with preparing a document. More about CMS: A reasonable scheduler that gives priority to real I/O so that number crunchers wait while editors can go merrily on. UNIX doesn't seem to do this as well. This could go on all day, I don't think I could come up with much more in favor of CMS though. Please note that I think CMS is reasonable for doing lots of kinds of work, I just MUCH prefer the enviroment provided by UNIX. Also, please excuse much of the grammer and spelling, I have no editor escape. There is anabove that should be , but the split infinitive is there because I like them. I can't wait to hear what people like about CMS and see as the drawbacks of UNIX. -Cliff (ucbvax!g:cliff)