garry@TCGOULD.TN.CORNELL.EDU (Garry Wiegand) (06/30/86)
(there's been a "best operating system?" discussion flowing on net.decus and net.unix for the past week. It's (naturally) turned into the traditional Unix-vs-VMS battle. I thought info-vaxers might be interested doing a little skirmishing, so I'm cross-posting this latest. Ahem.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- By just saying what I *liked* about VMS, and not saying *anything* about any other operating system, I was trying hard not to get drawn into the Unix wars. But I can't take the all the nonsense (tho there's been some sense too) that's been flowing by. Specifically: 1) Any message that begins with something of the form of "I prefer Unix but I'm a VMS expert too and I know you can't do ..." deserves an immediate 'n' key. The body of the message can be safely assumed to be wrong. 2) The C language and the C run-time library are no longer the same thing as "Unix"! I have cheerfully carried C programs full of library calls back and forth between my VMS Vax, my Unix Vax, a MS-DOS PC, and a MacIntosh. When I want to create a file with a specific file protection (not that I ever have wanted such a thing :-)) I call 'creat'! Yes, on VMS! What we're supposed to be having here is a system war, not a language war. Let's keep it pure, people! 3) The c-shell and Bourne shell are fine and wonderful in and of themselves, and would be a nice amenity on any system. Wollongong's implementation of them on VMS side-stepped the process creation problem, but they unfortunately lost the DCL commands somewhere else along the way, leaving only the Unix syntax. I like my DCL command syntax and I'd love to be able to wrap a better control structure around them. (I haven't seen Dec/Shell yet; don't know if they did it right.) Anyhow, the *shell* isn't "Unix" either! 4) What *is* unique to a Unix system are the Unix system service calls, like 'stty' and 'fork' (as opposed to 'vfork'). This has made carrying system-referencing utilities between vanilla unixae pretty easy, and I can't deny it. *Diatribe begins here* But what I see now is Berkeley diverging from Bell Labs, all the micros out there diverging from both, and many wizards burning the midnight oil adding whizbangs like sockets, asynchronous I/O, window managers, and network file systems -- proprietary things that will never be propagated to the whole unix world. Soon you will have to refer to Unix as "a family of operating systems", seriously overlapping with other systems like VMS. Which is all to the good. "Cross-fertilization", says I. "Willingness to listen to other ideas", says I. When it comes to something as complex as an operating system and all its support utilities, don't close yourself out. Standards are for dead people. (Now, can I please have a good Ultrix debugger?) *end diatribe* -- garry wiegand (garry%cadif-oak@cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu)