ANNE@Etl-Ai.ARPA (04/11/84)
From: Anne Werkheiser <ANNE@Etl-Ai.ARPA>
Hello, world!
We are anne, bettie, bill, connie, dan, gene, george, john, kim,
mike, olin, and tice. Together we are the (almost) brand new Center
for Artificial Intelligence at the (U.S. Army) Engineer Topographic
Laboratory. Our site name is "etl-ai".
Our development system is Unix simulated by Eunice running on top
of VMS. It's pretty terrible. I want to move to one of the native-
mode Unices, and in order to do that I have to write a justification
to my management. A passing wizard told me that many years ago the
issue of Unix vs. VMS was fought out in Netland and Unix won. Somewhere
all those messages must be sitting on an archive, with lots of good words
that I could use. Does anyone know where they are, and how I could
find them? I would also like to receive advice from Unix fans, gurus,
androids, cyborgs, and housecats. I need all the help I can get.
Anne
--------arpanet: anne@etl-ai
----------snail: A
----------snail: Anne Werkheiser
USAETL
Ft. Belvoir, VA 22060
---------phone (703) 664-6176 or (703) 664-3220
Thank you.
-------cowan@Udel-Relay.ARPA (04/11/84)
From: Ken Cowan <cowan@Udel-Relay.ARPA> Anne, Welcome to net land. If everyone on your machine is running Unix software, the justification ought to be easy. Although I am not familiar with the internals of Eunice, its slowness should be attributable to the fact that you have another layer of software between you and the machine. In a *native* unix environment, you talk directly to the operating system for os type things. In an Eunice environment, Eunice must interceed for you and ask the operating system (VMS) for what you want. The problem is that there might be a reason that Eunice is necessary. It is possible that the machine needs to run software (most likely proprietary) that is not available to run on Unix and so must run VMS. Is so, Eunice is probably there to permit the VMS machine to communicate with Unix machines in your network. <FLAME ON> I happen to like VMS, so I would be careful to choose the operating system I use based on the avaiablity of the software I need. I would not just chuck VMS out the window because it is chic. <FLAME OFF> Good luck. Ken
Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA (04/12/84)
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA> Welcome to the net. It's good to have more AIers. I assume that the discussion you refer to is the VMS vs. UNIX vs. TOPS-20/TENEX melee on Human-Nets (now @RUTGERS) during November of 1981. It may also have been on Unix-Wizards; I wasn't tuned in to them. I have saved some pieces of the discussion, but they won't be of much help to you. The participants were comparing user interfaces rather than system services and efficiency, and there was no concensus on a winner. You will find a few slams against VMS (not all true, I might add) and almost an equal number of messages defending VMS as an elegant system. The attacks against the Unix user interface were even more telling. (I've saved a copy of Don Norman's lengthy treatise on the unhuman engineering of Unix.) Much of the debate centered on whether command-name and argument completion are essential in a modern operating system. I have experience with both Unix and Eunice, and am currently using Eunice on a sister system to the one at ETL. I don't have timing statistics handy, but the Eunice interface is not noticeably slower than for a pure Unix system. Sprouting of processes (and executing associated initialization files) is a little slow on either operating system, but other things seem to happen instantaneously. The overhead in converting a Unix system call to a VMS system call is negligible. Some things, such as image I/O, happen much faster on a VMS/Eunice system than on a Berkeley Unix system. The Eunice user interface is the Unix interface, with very few exceptions. Two years ago Eunice went through a complete rewrite (from VMS macros into C code) and very few bugs have turned up since. I may get a Eunice error message once in three or four months, but essentially all problems have been fixed in the code that I use to get my work done. When bugs are discovered, it is often because of errors in the supplied Unix code (e.g., dependence on the storage order of two scalars) that happen to work on a Unix C compiler but fail on the VMS C compiler; this really can't be blamed on Eunice. You may also use the full VMS operating system interface wherever it is more useful -- and you don't even have to switch out of your Unix-style environment to use it. Some people prefer the VMS dumper to the tar command (which tends to be very sensitive to bit errors); they can have it. Others want a command to change files foo.* to bar.*; VMS supplies it. If you have programs that will only run under VMS, Eunice lets you run them. In addition, Eunice has some improvements over either Unix or VMS, by virtue of having selected from the the best techniques of both. Many users would like to have VMS/TWENEX-style multiple file versions in a Unix-style environment, so Eunice makes that available via a switch in your login file. (I don't use this capability, but I seem to be a minority of one here.) Eunice also gives you the option of circumventing Unix filename length restrictions. A version of EUNICE now under development emulates TWENEX operating system services as well as those of Unix, so you can run TWENEX-style argument completion, help facilities, and programs such as the MM mailer. Well, in what way then is either Unix or VMS alone better than a Eunice system? Since I'm content, I may not be the right person to ask. I would say, though, that either system alone is bound to be simpler than the combination; thus I wouldn't recommend Eunice for sites with a continuing preponderance of novices. Eunice is also more difficult for the system manager and the system wizards since they really do have to understand the dual nature of the system. Other users will typically stick with VMS commands or with Unix commands and won't be aware of the split personality. Only very rarely are bits of VMS magic needed to do unimplemented Unix functions, and those situations seem to be getting fewer all the time. I have been using Eunice for several years now and I don't remember how to write a VMS DCL script -- I don't need to. -- Ken Laws -------
ka@hou3c.UUCP (Kenneth Almquist) (04/19/84)
One thing Eunice does not implement properly is the link system call. Apparently it does some fancy bookkeeping so that a link/unlink sequence can be used to rename a file, but other uses of the link system call will not work. This causes problems with the MH mailer and with netnews, to name two examples I am familiar with. Kenneth Almquist