*BSD News Article 40052


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From: peter@bonkers.taronga.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: VMS => WNT (was: Interested in PowerPC for Linux / FreeBSD / NetBSD?)
Followup-To: comp.os.misc,comp.unix.misc,comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.386bsd.misc
Organization: Taronga Park BBS
Message-ID: <D1Ltw2.FvJ@bonkers.taronga.com>
References: <3cilp3$143@news-2.csn.net> <dyue.788655868@femto> <MICHAELV.94Dec28203707@MindBender.HeadCandy.com> <D1Lrr1.Kn@murdoch.acc.virginia.edu>
Date: Fri, 30 Dec 1994 03:33:38 GMT
Lines: 15

>|Dave Cutler has designed three OS's:  RSX, VMS, NT.  There's a common thread
>|running through all three; many ideas are common to all of them. Each, how-
>|ever, also has a flavor of "keep the good ideas of the old, throw out the
>|bad" - and add in important new things along the way.

Speaking as someone who went from TOPS-20 to UNIX and RSX to VMS and back
to UNIX, I much prefer RSX to VMS in many ways. A lot of the "new things"
added to VMS (and back-ported to RSX) were counterproductive, and some of
the stuff in RSX that was thrown out turned out to be really quite important.
Porting software from RSX to VMS occasionally ran into "you can't do that"
type walls. To do it justice, I'll say the same was true from RSX to UNIX,
but at least in UNIX the programs usually got a lot smaller, simpler, and
more general in the process, even if I had to give up good async I/O... and
nobody was claiming UNIX was a complete replacement for a realtime O/S like
RSX as they were for VMS.