langloui (05/14/82)
Re: CP PER, Student CMS, Batch, and Unix in general...
CP PER -- Available from University of Maine. I don't have their address,
since our copy of PER came from SAS Institute. They are
probably in VMSHARE, if you have access to it.
Student CMS -- This past semester (Jan-May), we had several classes from
campus (Purdue Univ.) use the 4341 processor at LARS. The
response from students was favorable using CMS. They prefer!!
CMS over PROCSY (home-grown, poor excuse for a interactive
system), and yes, Unix fans, even Unix!! (In my opinion,
they have excellent taste.) They were using regular CMS,
with no special modifications to the system.
Batch -- You mean there are still people out there using OS for a batch
system under VM??? We folks here at LARS (Laboratory for the
Applications of Remote Sensing)/Purdue have written a CMS BATCH
facility. It is a rewrite based (very loosely) on CMSBATCH
that IBM distributes with CMS. Ours (I work at LARS...) uses
VMCF for communications between a central monitor and the slave
machines. This way, the monitor schedules jobs for execution
based on system utilization and rate scheduling criteria. For
further information and/or documentation on it, contact:
Louis Lang
LARS/Purdue University
1220 Potter Dr.
W. Lafayette IN 47906-1391
Phone: (317) 494-6305 Ext 256
net addr: decvax!pur-ee:langloui
>From the above comments, it's pretty obvious that I'm a CMS bigot. Unix
is nice (if nothing else is available), especially for mini's. I would
rather use Unix than RSX, but give me CMS any time!!!G:cliff (05/14/82)
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 an <it's> above that should be <its>, 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)