purdon@athena.mit.edu (James R Purdon) (07/19/90)
Several postings have been made indicating that "Historian" is not the same as "UPDATE" on NOS/BE. This is certainly the case. However, I used "Historian" successfully with decks (naturally the PL's had to be rebuilt) originally intended for use on a NOS system. Granted, the decks consisted mainly of deletes and adds. The source files for the PLs, containing *DECK and *COMDECK directives, did not have to be changed. Such decks also worked with UPDATE on the Cyber 205 running VSOS, with Historian on a VAX 8600 running VMS, and Historian on an ETA-10E running EOS (while one poster has claimed that Historian was never offered as part of an EOS release, my experience at the JvNC was otherwise, where Historian became available early in 89). I used the same decks under Historian as I did under UPDATE without having to make any changes (except invoking the command - UPDATE is a "one program does everything" deal, while Historian had several different programs). For my purposes they were 100% compatible. Depending on your purposes, they may or may not be, but I strongly suspect you won't have to make many changes in your source decks. Jim