bzs@bu-cs.bu.EDU (Barry Shein) (07/07/87)
> Perhaps DEC plans its next generation OS to be a hybrid between >Unix and VMS?! I doubt this very, very much (other than some emulation such as DEC's CMS stuff [eunice-oid]...not to be confused with IBM's CMS stuff.) There are incredibly fundamental differences beteween VMS and UNIX, notably in the file system philosophy and generally the file system interface. VMS's heavily typed file system is a major obstacle to the entire UNIX concept of files/pipes/devices as byte streams. In fact, I can't even imagine what this thought means without losing one or the other's character in an important way. The only things VMS and UNIX have in common is ASCII and full-duplex, and even that only about 95% (one of those systems is quite shy about accepting lower case and the obsolescence of the KSR33.) Q. What do elephants and giraffes have in common? A. They all have long necks, except for the elephants. -Barry Shein, Boston University