reid@Glacier.ARPA (12/11/84)
Digital Equipment Corporation publishes a newsletter entitled DECWORLD, which is sent to all employees. The November 1984 (Volume 8/Number 5) issue of DECWORLD contains a transcript of the State of the Company address given by Ken Olsen (president of DEC) at the DEC annual meeting. The date of that meeting is not given in the newsletter. Here is an exact quote, not particularly taken out of context, from that address. I have proofread this text fairly carefully, and I believe that there are no errors in my transcription below. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX? Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines. And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s. It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming. With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there.