Re: OT: Intels quickens cadence for new 8086s

In article <ZbKeUJdCVNa6@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
nothome@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Malcolm Dunnett) writes:
In article <4c16u0F13nb5vU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
bill@xxxxxxxxxxx (Bill Gunshannon) writes:

And that is a matter of opinion. While I like VMS, from the standpoint
of student use Unix always wins in ease of use available (out of the box)
functionality. Argue it if you want, but I run both Unix and VMS systems
and get to see it first hand.

Can you elaborate on this point? We taught first/second year CS
courses on VMS for many years and ease of use was never an issue.

So did we. Until Unix showed up and suddenly, no one wanted to use VMS
any more. And, I am not talking about just CS students here. CS students
automagically got Unix accounts on the department machines. We got lots
of requests from students and even faculty in other departments who wanted
Unix accounts rather than continue using VMS which had been the academic
machine since before I eve got here.

What
Unix features do you believe make it significantly easier for a computing
neophyte to grasp?

Couldn't say. I learned Unix from the online docs and from the original
tech papers that used to come bundled with Unix systems form the Ritchie-
Kernigan-Thompson days. My daughter learned how to use Unix when she was
about 6, with no real instruction at all. Just by playing around with it.
She has a version if Rogue for her PC to this day!! :-)


And, as another data point, back when PC's
were still rather rare, the university had a VMS machine for general
academic use. We were the only department on campus with Unix systems.
We were constantly flooded with requests for accounts from students an
faculty who found the VMS system to not meet their needs.

In what way did it not meet their needs?

I have no way of knowing.

I suspect it was because
they wanted to run software someone else had written for Unix and it
wouldn't run "out of the box" on VMS.

Cute assumption, but with no basis in fact. Non-CS Faculty tend to not
play with computers, just use them to get their work done. I assume that
would mean they found it easier to do email, write papers, keep grades
ande whatever else. But, I really have no way of knowing because we
didn't ask. If they were faculty or staff we usually granted their request.
If they were students, we usually turned them down. We have had students
who actually took classes in the CS area as electives because it was the
easiest way to get an account. And somehow I can't see all these non-CS
students sitting around playing NetHack.

To me though this is more of an
effect than a cause - had DEC been better about getting VMS into widespread
use in universities ( and keeping it there ) back in the early 80s that
might not have been such an issue - the software they wanted to run would
have been written for VMS, not Unix, and the situation would have been
reversed.

Ummmm...... Actually, they did. When I was at West Point, while the Dean
had a research lab that had Unix (SYSV) and made use of these machines
available, the CS (actually, G&CS) departmen had a VAX running VMS. It
did have Eunice, but anyone who has ever used that knows what a dog it was.

You are, to a certain extent, right about the software thign, though. I
remember an RFP I once worked on the response to where my company was
bidding Primes and DEC was bidding an, as yet imaginary, VAX. We withdrew
when it became obvious the RFP was a sham and they were going to buy the
VAX no matter what the results of the Proposals were. After the fact, we
learned that what they got was a VAX running VMS and the original intent
driving the desire to have a VAX was to run software from Kitt Peak Obser-
vatory. The software was for BSD Unix. :-) Just another example of how
"Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it!"


I saw this happen myself at the time. In the early 80s many of the
colleges around here used VMS in their CS courses. However the advent
of relatively cheap systems from other vendors ( primarily Sun ) quickly
eroded this market. DEC refused to compete effectively against these
offerings with cheap VAXen (I had DEC reps at the time tell me they didn't
care what Sun did, they saw IBM customers as the market they wanted to go after)

Even after we put in whole labs of Unix Workstations with Unix Servers
backing them up we continued to use VMS, in particular for the first two
CS Programming Courses. But it rapidly became a matter of the students
using VMS for those things they had to use VMS for while doing everything
they could on the Unix Workstations. I still run VMS here in the department
and we have at least one course that still requires that the students use
it. (This also helps with our accreditation which requires that the students
at least be exposed to more than one OS.) Even with DECWindows being
available so they can point-and-click to their hearts content they still
prefer Unix. Can't tell you why, I am not a sociologist.


It's not that there wasn't competetive VAX hardware - a $30,000 VAXStation
could easily handle many multi-user workloads ( and was priced similarly
to a Sun workstation at the time ), but DEC wouldn't sell a multi-user
VMS license for it ( Sun had multi-user licenses on their boxes ) and
instead wanted you to buy a "VAXServer" offering which had the same
CPU and memory capacity but cost well over $100,000.

But all you keep saying is that the schools stopped making VMS available.
Not true here. Other than the VMS system I run in the department, the
University still has a genereal purpose academic VMS machine. It sees
very little use and at the rate things are going I suspect it will not
be long before they drop it as not being worth the cost.


When we stopped teaching on VMS it had nothing to do with the
faculty or students disliking it or feeling Unix was inherently a better
teaching environment - it was simply an acknowledgement that the world had
moved that way and the students would be better served by being exposed
to the "industry standard" environment.

But we still teach in VMS. And still no one really wants to use it. I
think there is much more to it than that. If it was a matter of "industry
standard", the students wouldn't want to use Unix either, but they do!!

bill

--
Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves
bill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton |
Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include <std.disclaimer.h>
.

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