Re: What's VMS up to these days?

On 2012-02-03 22.39, Mike K. wrote:
On Feb 3, 4:21 pm, Johnny Billquist<b...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Here is another possible explanation: early adopters of new
technology/high tech country.

What would you have choose in the late 70s/early 80s?
DOS 1.0?
Unix?
RDOS?
MVS?

That all depends on what you needed and how much money you had. MVS,
VM/370, VMS and Unix were all valid options for large-scale multiuser
systems. CP/M (and later MS-DOS) were both valid choices for a small
business, as was the Apple II. If you were using a Nova or a small
Eclipse to run lab equipment, RDOS was even still an option, though if
you were running anything larger, I'm sure that DG would be trying to
sell you on AOS. Really that's the beauty of that era, no matter what
your needs were, there was a system out there that fit it.

Late 70s, early 80s were not a time for Unix. It was still very hard to even get hold of if you weren't academia, as well as being rather immature. It had recently been ported to the VAX, but was still rather poor both in features and performance compared to VMS.
MVS and other offerings from IBM was something that was so batch oriented that it worked for specific customers, but every new business case meant major development of various components, as well as not really suitable for a lot of new, interactive, more real time type of applications.

CP/M did exist, and was sometimes usable. One big problem was that the hardware you had for those kind of systems were horrible when it came to reliability. Apple II had the same kind of problems. It was ok to use in an office with controlled and friendly environment, on your desk. But that is not where a lot of things were happening back then.

I wonder if AOS had even came to market at that time. Didn't RDOS also exist in a version for the Eclipse? Anyway, the Eclipse was not a nice machine (in my opinion), and never really took off. Nova was DGs big success, and it was definitely an option. But RDOS was not that good.

There were definitely a lot of systems out there back then, but not really many that were that good. Many of them came and went in a very short time.

Johnny
.

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