Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) Newsgroups: net.unix Subject: How do Unix and VMS compare? Message-ID: <3977@utzoo.UUCP> Date: Fri, 22-Jun-84 14:07:03 EDT Article-I.D.: utzoo.3977 Posted: Fri Jun 22 14:07:03 1984 Date-Received: Fri, 22-Jun-84 14:07:03 EDT References: <1000@sri-arpa.UUCP> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology Lines: 37 > A stinking minor version change breaks the whole world. Already > there are two different Unixes. No, there aren't. There is Unix, and there is a hodge-podge from Berkeley that calls itself Unix but isn't. Don't be taken in by misleading advertising. At Usenix I wore (part of the time) a button saying "4.2BSD does everything UNIX does, only differently.". > Often things don't work. The "bugs" section on every manual page > is a real loser, since no one seems to fix things, and if they did, that > might break someone's program that depends on the bug. The difference is that VMS doesn't bother documenting the bugs. As for "no one seems to fix things", this is sometimes true of DEC as well. > ....... Imagine this situation; I have invested zillions of dollars in an > application (running under 4.1) that has become essential, and it won't run > under 4.2. This can also happen in VMS land, but is much less likely. If you try to port things from a more-or-less Unix (e.g. 4.1) to a system that claims to be Unix but isn't (4.2), of course you're going to run into trouble. Stuff written for V7 will run on damn near any Unix in existence, across an immense spectrum of hardware. I speak from some experience on this; U of T and its friends are *not* all-Dec shops by any stretch of the imagination. > ................................................... We wrote IP and UDP > for VMS, so we can communicate in a primitive fashion over the ethernet > (I'm sorry, but UUCP is just a little too mickey mouse for me. I've had > to use it, and I hate it). Much of this software is available, or soon > becoming available. There are any number of people selling non-primitive Ethernet software for Unix already. Writing your own for Unix is unnecessary. -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry