What have we lost? – Demo of exotic OSes (2021) [video]

Re:What have we lost? – Demo of exotic OSes (2021) [video] by anyfoo on Thursday August 25, 2022 @08:03PM (#32601663)

But then either VMS is much closer to UNIX than to things like IBM i (or IBM mainframes, which are however themselves very, very different from IBM i), or Windows is closer to UNIX than VMS. Because Windows is very close to UNIX compared to either of those.

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Re:What have we lost? – Demo of exotic OSes (2021) [video] by indymike on Thursday August 25, 2022 @08:26PM (#32601825)

> But then either VMS is much closer to UNIX than to things like IBM i

I'm not really sure that is the case at all. VMS had versioning file system that had support for multiple file types including stream, sequential, indexed and relative. It had a very different security model, four levels of processor access (unix there's kernel and userland) and it had very different networking capabilities, including clustering baked in (in 1983).

> Because Windows is very close to UNIX compared to either of those.

There's deep VMS heritage in Windows NT: both VMS and NT were written by David Cutler.

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Re:What have we lost? – Demo of exotic OSes (2021) [video] by anyfoo on Thursday August 25, 2022 @09:19PM (#32602214)

I know! But then VMS is maybe closer than it seems? Have a look at IBM i.

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Re:What have we lost? – Demo of exotic OSes (2021) [video] by lboc on Thursday August 25, 2022 @10:14PM (#32602612)

Agreed. I've only limited experience with i, but more with z. After using them, the other OSes you might use start to look and feel pretty similar to each other.

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Re:What have we lost? – Demo of exotic OSes (2021) [video] by mek6800d2 on Thursday August 25, 2022 @08:34PM (#32601889)

Microsoft hired the main architect of VMS, Dave Cutler, away from DEC to design Windows NT. (VMS++ = WNT)

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Re:What have we lost? – Demo of exotic OSes (2021) [video] by Maursault on Thursday August 25, 2022 @10:43PM (#32602779)

You've got it backwards. Digital cancelled Cutler's pet project and he shopped himself, and Digital's IP, to Microsoft. VMS and NT have a lot of similarities, but NT is not VMS, though they have a common ancestor: MICA = NT

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_MICA

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Re:What have we lost? – Demo of exotic OSes (2021) [video] by chasil on Thursday August 25, 2022 @10:54PM (#32602853)

Windows has very stringent file locking; Unix doesn't.

I believe this major design difference came from VMS.

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