[ale] question of os [drifting OT]

[Joseph A. Knapka]

Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> 
> I think he's thinking of Hurd.
> 
> The GNU project (Richard Stallman a.k.a. "RMS") was supposed to be a
> complete Unix work-alike but had no OS kernel.  What we know as "Linux"
> is sometimes (at least in RMS' presence :-) ) referred to as the
> GNU/Linux operating system.  It was a matter of two independent
> undertakings being brought together at just the right time.
> 
> Stephen, one could make one's life's work out of dealing with different
> OSses.  For Intel CPUs alone, you already know of Linux and Windows but
> there has been the BSDs (OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD) that are current now,
> BeOS, Novell NetWare, Banyan VINES (actually based on an earlier UNIX),
> various Unix flavors (SCO, Interactive, AT&T), and who knows what else.
> I think that the Hurd kernel is finally available; I dunno about a
> working distro of it.
> 
> There have been many Unix variants, including those from IBM (AIX), Cray
> (UNICOS), Sun (Solaris), SGI (IRIX), HP (HP-UX), and DEC (now known as
> Tru64 Unix).
> 
> For a total of about seven years, I worked with DEC's (now Compaq's) VMS
> (now known as OpenVMS); even by Linux standards, it was/is a very
> capable OS whose native file system is said to be far more sophisticated
> than Linux' and most (if not all) Unices.  I still miss its batch queue
> mechanism.  VMS is still with us, but it's destined to die as its
> platforms (VAX and Alpha) die.

But it lives on as Windows NT! (Dave Cutler, designer of VMS, moved
on to M$ and designed NT.)

Actually, VMS seems to be alive and well - my employer ships a
number of flagship apps that run only on OpenVMS. (Though come
to think of it, we're busily porting them to Windows now...
I suspect we are not doing our customers any favors.)

One big nit: it seems to be impossible, due to VMS's "rich"
filesystem semantics, to move a VMS file via any other
OS on the planet without doing grievous harm to the contents.
Do you know of a way to do it? I'd love to have vi on our
Alpha - anything is better than edt. But all my attempts to
snarf a VMS binary of vi off of a number of different
archive sites have failed: the resulting exe is invariably
rejected by the VMS executive as being an "unknown executable
format" or some such.

Cheers,

-- Joe
  "I'd rather chew my leg off than maintain Java code, which
   sucks, 'cause I have a lot of Java code to maintain and
   the leg surgery is starting to get expensive." - Me

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