Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!inuxc!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi
From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Re: Are VMS and VAX synonymous (Was: Re: VMS games)
Message-ID: <1669@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Date: 11 Dec 87 15:46:48 GMT
References: <39rrk@byuvax.bitnet>
Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana
Lines: 24

In article <39rrk@byuvax.bitnet> rrk@byuvax.bitnet writes:
     It is obvious that VMS is the operating system of the VAX just as
     DOS [is the] operating system of the PC.

Actually, DOS originally ran on early IBM systems, way back in the
sixties.  (Some people confuse between OS and DOS.  Both OS and DOS ran
on IBM systems, but they were not the same thing.  If you were running
DOS and all your disks crashed, you were left with OS.)  Later, DEC
adapted DOS to run on its PDP-11 series.  Because of sophisticated
batch facilities that were added to DOS, DEC called it DOS/BATCH.
Then, in the early eighties, a young guy called Bill Gates saw the long
heritage of DOS, and saw its potential for small systems, and used
sophisticated compression techniques to reduce its size down to a few
kilobytes, thus giving us today's modern DOS.  Also, the folks at Amiga
realized that DOS was a great thing, and adapted it for the Amiga and
called it AmigaDOS.

VMS, on the other hand, has no heritage to speak of.  A bunch of guys
in long hair and sandals were having decaffinated coffee and discussing
virtual memory one day, and one of them said, "well, if you have a LOT
of virtual memory, you can call it a system", and the rest is
geography.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  !{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi