[VAXman(Admin)]

Originally Posted by Methem

(Sorry for hijacking your beautiful science thread for this sort of stuff, folks. )


Vi isn't my cup of tea either. I use Emacs on my Linux box. I don't claim to be any sort of guru with it though -- far from it.

Like I said, I can get around in VI... not every unix box is going to have EMACS installed so best to know some rudimentary VI skills.

Originally Posted by Methem

Can't much comment on the merits of each of those, as I don't really know too much about VMS at this point. So far I've been reading about it and mainly using the machines of the Deathrow cluster to experiment with things. Going the Hobbyist route is of course a consideration and has been for quite a long while now.

TECO was available on the PDP OSs but when VMS first hit the streets, it didn't have TECO. When customers asked why their favorite editor was not included, DEC responded, "TECO is not an editor, it's a programming language". I think Andy Goldstein ported TECO from RSM-11(M+) to VMS as he was one of its avid users. It's written in Macro-11(VAX assembly). TECO is still available on VMS today and building it is one of the regression tests used to guage the Macro-11 "compilers" now available on Alpha and the Itanium.

Originally Posted by Methem

The first time I've used VMS was a few years ago when I was doing some summer work in steel industry. The place was a cold-rolling mill, and it was a large annealing and pickling line that processed stainless steel strip. There was an oldish Alpha box with, I think, VMS 6.x installed on it. The box provided some mathematical models and calculations for the the general automation system that controlled the production line. Among other things, the box was used to adjust the temperatures in the large annealing furnace that processed the strip. Now, that was a safe place to experiment with the OS.

VMS is found in many production scenarios. When and where it absolutley has to run, you're likely to find VMS.

The US Postal service uses VMS to sort and route all mail (letters, packages, flats). The USPS sorts/routes 40K times the volume of all of the other package handling services in the US daily... that's a lot of mail!

...and you wouldn't have the PeeCee either. Intel runs all of its fabs on VMS. They can't afford downtime. Even a few minutes of downtime costs $millions to Intel.

..and until recently, Micro$oft themselves ran all of the accounting for the firm on VMS. Seems even M$ didn't trust their own product when and where it mattered to them most -- the money! Only when a certain application provider HQed in .DE was able to provide a redundancy option in its app -- no longer requiring VMS to protect it -- did M$ get off of VMS. Rumor has it that it's still there for backup.

I guess I needn't mention it is secure. Here's SANS' latest list of security vulnerabilities. Note what is NOT on their list.