aglew@mcdurb.Urbana.Gould.COM (03/24/89)
>It is interesting to note that there is a Unix emulator for VMS, but >there is no VMS emulator for Unix%. This means one of three things: >either (a) it is impossible; (b) it is undesirable; or (c) both. A UNIX emulator can purchase a UNIX licence, and get a variety of user code, and even a bit of kernel code, useable on the VMS target. A VMS emulator, on the other hand, would have to start from scratch; I doubt that DEC would sell the code. I have heard of "VMS compatible" OSes from small system houses, but they are inevitably underfeatured. --- I am sure that a number of vendors would not mind having a VMS emulator. Hell, the ability to almost run VMS FORTRAN (not UNIX F77) has been one of Convex's big advantages.
gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn ) (03/24/89)
In article <59300006@mcdurb> aglew@mcdurb.Urbana.Gould.COM writes: >A VMS emulator, on the other hand, would have to start from scratch; >I doubt that DEC would sell the code. Coming from a Gould (DEC competitor) employee, this smacks a bit of unfairness. Unless DEC has radically changed their policy since I looked into this several years ago, VMS source can be licensed and its cost is of the same order of magnitude as an initial UNIX source license. However, much of the VMS system (at least back when I had access to it) was coded in macro assembler and BLISS, which makes porting it considerably more difficult than porting UNIX which as we all know is written almost entirely in C.