Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!husc6!psuvax1!vu-vlsi!
swatsun!hirai
From: hi...@swatsun.uucp (Eiji "A.G." Hirai)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Help us defend against VMS!
Message-ID: <1636@tulum.UUCP>
Date: 29 Feb 88 03:53:44 GMT
Organization: Sun Lab, Swarthmore College PA
Lines: 22
Hello Unix Wizards!
Our campus is almost on the verge of being turned into a VMS
filled campus due to the lack of knowledge of the person in charage of
computing services here. The next couple of months will determine
what the campus computer scene will be like during the next decade.
This person has in mind buying Vaxes with VMS, and DECnet with lots of
money...
Is VMS as horrible as I suspect or am I alone an thinking this?
Please help shed the light for us! Please tell us what you think would be
reasons why you wouldn't buy VMS! (or why you would). We need the help
of all you wizards out there. Any examples you can think of will help!
Thanks for your cooperation and knowledge. Is VMS that bad??
-a.g. hirai
outgunned sysadmin
--
Eiji "A.G." Hirai @ Swarthmore College, Swarthmore PA 19081 | Tel. 215-543-9855
UUCP: {rutgers, ihnp4, cbosgd}!bpa!swatsun!hirai | "All Cretans are liars."
Bitnet: vu-vlsi!swatsun!hi...@psuvax1.bitnet | -Epimenides
Internet: bpa!swatsun!hi...@rutgers.edu | of Cnossus, Crete
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!lll-tis!ames!hao!gatech!
bloom-beacon!bu-cs!bzs
From: b...@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Help us defend against VMS!
Message-ID: <20268@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 29 Feb 88 17:09:42 GMT
References: <1636@tulum.UUCP>
Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci.
Lines: 215
In-reply-to: hirai@swatsun.uucp's message of 29 Feb 88 03:53:44 GMT
>Hello Unix Wizards!
>
> Our campus is almost on the verge of being turned into a VMS
>filled campus due to the lack of knowledge of the person in charage of
>computing services here. The next couple of months will determine
>what the campus computer scene will be like during the next decade.
>This person has in mind buying Vaxes with VMS, and DECnet with lots of
>money...
The basic problem with VMS is that it locks you into a single hardware
architecture and vendor. In this day and age that severely limits what
you can purchase in computing power. Vaxes vary widely in price but
not much in processing power. For example, a small uVax-II sells for
around $30K and offers a little less than 1 MIP. An 8750 sells for
perhaps $500K and offers a few MIPs. In the near future this range
closes even further, the uVax-3 being around 1/2 the processing power
of the top end with a price range of ten-fold. It's hard to buy worse
price-performance.
The Unix market ranges from PC based Unix systems which the average
student can afford (and this area is expanding rapidly) to the Cray-2,
a premiere super-computer, and just about everything in between. In
the middle market (typical small-medium scale time-sharing) one can
buy Unix systems from various vendors with upwards of ten times the
price performance of VMS.
Unix systems are relatively bundled, beyond mere hardware
considerations most Unix systems right out of the box are completely
useable. It can be supplemented in many significant ways with free or
nearly free (eg. ~$100 for an entire campus) software. VMS is heavily
unbundled, from day one if you want so much as a compiler you begin
layering heavy costs. And you'll pay a separate price for acquiring
and maintaining software on every CPU running VMS on campus. This will
quickly lock you out of the workstation market, having to add $100K in
basic software costs to 40 VMS workstations can put a real damper on a
typical University's plans, no matter how good the intentions.
Unix is the premiere system for compute intensive areas, such as the
sciences using Fortran. The reason is the vast range of power a
program written to run under Unix presents. As I said, a program
developed on a small, affordable PC or workstation can be copied and
re-run on huge compute engines. Although a lot of the sciences in the
past used VMS they now generally realize that this was an error and
the communities are rapidly switching to Unix, any argument that
science is done on VMS is a false argument of the past. You should
poll major science depts and research labs. If nothing else, the fact
that the Cray and other super-computers run Unix has pushed the
equation in this favor, a person using VMS is essentially locked out
of the entire NSF super-computer initiative. Decnet would tend to
reaffirm this retardation (TCP can be had on VMS but it's sort of like
teaching a pig to dance, speak to VMS sites and they'll tell you what
a general pain in the ass it is to deal with third party vendors,
network software breaking on each O/S release etc etc.)
The typical claim by the campus administrator is to point at all the
myriad applications and big-name software that runs on VMS and doesn't
run on Unix. In the first place, most of this now does run on Unix so
that tends to be an anachronistic view. Another point is that such
admins usually have DP-envy. No one on the campus has any need for any
of the big-name applications the person is bragging about, you're
running an academic environment, not a bank! Get a list of these
applications and you'll see how ludicrous this consideration is. Unix
tends to vastly dominate the academic community in software
availability. These admins will sneer at things like X-windows, lisp
(which doesn't cost $10K/node), AI systems etc in preference to their
big-name commercial databases and spread-sheets as if what students
and professors do is not to be taken seriously, then why are they on a
campus? It's no accident that both Athena and Andrew have chosen Unix
for their massive campus computing projects.
Unix makes available the forefront of hardware technology, parallel
processing from companies like Encore, Sequent, BBN (Butterfly), RISC
and the so-called "super-workstations" like Sun/4, MIPS, HP etc. which
can deliver nearly 1MIP/$1K of price. The parallel processor provide
time-sharing systems extending into the hundreds of MIPs, again for
about $1K/MIP. Anything new and innovative runs Unix, not VMS, it
would be foolish to lock an entire academic community out of all this.
I can understand why a bank is not particularly concerned, but why a
(supposedly) active research community? Why lock yourself out of all
this. The VMS salesthings will claim that they're going to do all this
*in the future*, they've been saying that for years and years, and
when they do come out with something it tends to be too little too
late, in name only, like a dual processor 8800 which barely exploits
what tiny parallelism it has.
VMS itself is not an interesting operating system to learn or study.
It is basically a re-work of RSX, an ancient real-time operating
system from the PDP11 (Unix also ran on the PDP11 years ago, but it
has grown in modern ways, as opposed to VMS's habit of just accreting
whatever features were needed to meet the next big govt contract.)
The claim that Unix is somehow less secure than VMS is a red herring.
Unix offers sufficient security for campus systems, you're not the NSA
(again the tactic of arguing that VMS is better for things you don't
need.) More importantly, many Unix systems are available with full
sources for a modest price, typically $1000/campus (it's simply a
matter of your vendor choices, more than you can say for VMS where
there is no choice.) Without the sources you are, at best, at the
mercy of the vendor for security. A huge security hole which is
bringing you to your knees (which happens regularly on VMS, and the
news travels the networks like wildfire) leaves you helpless and at
the vendor's whims as to whether or not they feel like closing the
hole this week, or next month, or put it off for next release.
In fact their concern with only commercial DP makes them *less*
interested in your security problems. Banks don't have malicious
students exploiting security holes and don't tend to notice such
things or complain about them. With Unix and the sources you can at
least plug up the hole by a code change and then call the vendor and
wait for the real fix, at least you'll be up and running until then.
Don't believe that VMS sources are available, it's a lie, demand to
see prices for all items needed such as Decnet sources. Demand to be
told what resources it would take to even manage such sources. Last I
checked it required the dedication of a few hundred thousand dollars
in hardware (basically, an entire larger Vax with large disks) to
manage sources.
Obviously the sources will also be of enormous benefit in answering
user questions, such as tracking down example code using particular
system calls. You can sort of do this with VMS's microfiche, if you
consider searching through microfiche for a particular system call
usage a good way to spend your time. You can't grep microfiche. Even
then you'll usually find that the way the system application
accomplishes what the user seems to want to do is by exploiting some
privilege you won't want to give to a user (I'm not sure I want to go
into the whole mess of the zillions of VMS "privilege" bits which
you'll never fully understand the implications of and will almost
surely end up giving away the store because some reasonable thing can
only be accomplished by giving a user some dangerous privilege bit,
Unix's single privilege scheme [root or not root] is much more secure,
you just don't give out root privs and you know exactly what can and
cannot be done by the two sets of users on your system, who wants to
calculate the permutations of 30+ priv bits and what they might imply
singly and in combination?.)
The programming and system interfaces in VMS are arcane and just a
hodgepodge of features, there's no particular underlying design
philosophy, just whatever marketing wanted this week. Although VMS has
some interesting software features it's nearly impossible for anyone
but a very experienced programmer to take advantage of these. This is
not really a damnation of VMS, VMS is a platform for delivering
turnkey applications software, like databases in commercial
environments for people who wouldn't think of programming in general,
just data entry and report generation. I'm *sure* this is
representative of your needs (hah!)
In an academic community one merely has to go into a campus bookstore
to see another argument. Look at all the Unix books! Where are the VMS
books?
There are none. A complete set of Unix manuals costs less than $100, a
more than sufficient set costs perhaps $50. A complete set of VMS docs
costs several hundred dollars, no student or even faculty member
(except the few richest) can afford to own a documentation set for
VMS. There's some on-line help in VMS but it's designed to sell
manuals or supplement them, the details are always missing
(purposely.)
Most Unix systems come with on-line, complete manual sets with the
exact same text used to produce the printed manuals. Thus, what's the
cost to a student for Unix manuals? For $0 (zero) they can get
everything, if they like manuals in their laps they can buy those for
the cost of a couple of textbooks. To supplement that they can buy any
of dozens of titles on Unix ranging from the structure of the
operating system, systems programming, compiler construction,
applications programming, AI, many programming languages, shell
programming, text processing etc etc. For VMS you'll be lucky to find
two titles (I can only think of one, the Internals book, and that's
hardly a text, oh yeah, there's an assembler textbook, both of those
are about five years old and don't even refer to the current VMS
system so you won't be able to use their code etc.)
So, running courses on VMS will mean foresaking textbooks. Very clever!
Good plan for running an academic environment! It's no accident, the
DEC/VMS crowd has no interest in academia, your sysadmin has DP-envy.
Decnet nearly completely locks you out of wide-area networking, such
as the arpanet. One need only look at the arpanet's University rolls
to see who you are abandoning, merely the foremost schools and
research labs in the country. About 95% of them use Unix systems to
hook up to the arpanet. Decnet is completely useless in this regard.
There are a couple of strange, semi-wide area networks based on DECNET
(few people could name them.) Perhaps one or two of your faculty
would like to be on them. You should buy them a microvax and get on
with the rest of the campus' needs, don't let the tail wag the dog.
And you can forget uucp and usenet entirely, which means no e-mail
to vendors etc.
In summary, buying into VMS for a campus is buying into the past in a
pathetic, nearly necrophilic way for an academic community. It locks
them out of the mainstream in Computer Science, Engineering, the
Sciences and many of the humanities (all the multi-media projects of
any interest are being done on either Unix or or Macintosh/PC
systems.) It has very little to offer an academic community for either
research or coursework. It is flying in the face of nearly all trends
in computing today and doing so at such a high dollar price that it
borders on irresponsible. This is not to say that there is no need for
even one VMS system on your campus, there probably is. But using it as
a campus standard is irresponsible and completely without merit or
rational justification and will cripple academic computing for years
to come. What other campuses do this?
This is not a religious flame, I have presented myriad factual basis
for my arguments. VMS people like to claim religious flame and
"chocolate vs vanilla!" arguments. This is because they cannot deal
with the real issues so making it a political war can only act to
their advantage. Avoid the issues, get the opponents fired, scare a
campus administrator with false promises of donations etc.
Unfortunately you may be up against an insidious cancer you only
barely understand which will manipulate your organization in ways you
will regret.
-Barry Shein, Boston University
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!brl-adm!
adm!...@icst-cmr.arpa
From: r...@icst-cmr.arpa (Root Boy Jim)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Help us defend against VMS!
Message-ID: <12041@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: 1 Mar 88 02:27:25 GMT
Sender: n...@brl-adm.ARPA
Lines: 28
Is VMS as horrible as I suspect or am I alone an thinking this?
You are not alone.
Please help shed the light for us! Please tell us what you think would be
reasons why you wouldn't buy VMS! (or why you would). We need the help
of all you wizards out there. Any examples you can think of will help!
Tell him to spend some time recruiting CS students. Tell him that if
they run VMS, no one will come to your school. Tell him about the lack
of *real* vendor support, regardless of what they promise. There will
be nothing for the hordes of wizards to do without source code. And
finally, mention the lack of real, modern, compatible networking.
Of course, after you go thru all this, then you'll have to convince
him to run BSD over System V.
At the very least, have him stage a test, in which some VMS and some
UNIX systems are supported. See which one is preferred. At least you'll
be able to salvage the hardware.
Thanks for your cooperation and knowledge. Is VMS that bad??
Not if you enjoy banging your head against the wall.
National Bureau of Standards
Flamer's Hotline: (301) 975-5688
FOOLED you! Absorb EGO SHATTERING impulse rays, polyester poltroon!!
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!nbires!hao!noao!arizona!lm
From: l...@arizona.edu (Larry McVoy)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Help us defend against VMS!
Message-ID: <4080@megaron.arizona.edu>
Date: 1 Mar 88 03:47:09 GMT
References: <1636@tulum.UUCP> <20268@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Reply-To: l...@megaron.arizona.edu (Larry McVoy)
Organization: University of Arizona, Tucson
Lines: 21
In article <20...@bu-cs.BU.EDU> b...@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
>Unix is the premiere system for compute intensive areas, such as the
>sciences using Fortran. The reason is the vast range of power a
>program written to run under Unix presents. As I said, a program
>developed on a small, affordable PC or workstation can be copied and
>re-run on huge compute engines. Although a lot of the sciences in the
>past used VMS they now generally realize that this was an error and
I agree with the rest of the article but this part is not completely
true. VMS fortran is the de facto industry standard. Until I can have
all the VMS extensions (and there are a lot of very useful ones) this
argument does not hold water. Sorry, Barry, but we can't misrepresent
the facts. And maybe Ultrix supports them (I don't know) but that's
not enough - your argument said from the PC to the super computer
(super computer companies take the VMS extensions _very_ seriously).
I really feel sort of gross sticking up for VMS but this is one place
that it shines, and fair is fair.
--
Larry McVoy l...@arizona.edu or ...!{uwvax,sun}!arizona.edu!lm
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!brl-adm!adm!
JSOTTILE%LOYVAX.BIT...@cunyvm.cuny.edu
From: JSOTTILE%LOYVAX.BIT...@cunyvm.cuny.edu
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: RE: VMS is not the evil empire
Message-ID: <12067@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: 2 Mar 88 10:40:08 GMT
Sender: n...@brl-adm.ARPA
Lines: 82
Root Boy Jim (r...@icst-cmr.arpa) writes:
>> Is VMS as horrible as I suspect or am I alone an thinking this?
>
>You are not alone.
>>
>> Please help shed the light for us! Please tell us what you think would be
>> reasons why you wouldn't buy VMS! (or why you would). We need the help
>> of all you wizards out there. Any examples you can think of will help!
>>
>Tell him to spend some time recruiting CS students. Tell him that if
>they run VMS, no one will come to your school. Tell him about the lack
>of *real* vendor support, regardless of what they promise. There will
>be nothing for the hordes of wizards to do without source code. And
>finally, mention the lack of real, modern, compatible networking.
I am somewhat miffed here. As you can see from my address, I use VMS. I
hear all of you out there complaining and I just want to clear the air.
VMS is not as bad as you folks are making it seem. I use both UNIX and VMS
and each has their advantages.
VMS is nice for an academic atmosphere or a site where most of your users
don't want to know the details about how something works or how to do
something. As far as support, our site has had *no* problems with getting
help from DEC. In fact, I can call in at 1pm (usually the "busiest" times)
and if the department that I have my question for is unavailable, i can
expect a call from them within a hour or two. The folks of DEC are very
helpful and they know what to tell you to do and they DO explain as they
go. In fact, I was having problems calling some system services and I
bothered a guy from DEC about it and he spent about an hour on it (I mailed
my program to him). He called me back and told me what the problem was and
why it was acting that way. The fault was all mine and not DEC's.
Sometimes, RTFM doesn't quite go far enough.
The operating system itself is sound and is somewhat secure depending on
how far you really want to go. The hardware gives us little problems (we
have 2 clustered 11/785's with an HSC50 and 4 RA81s and various other
carry-overs form the old PDP 11 we had).
As far as application programming or any programming, for that matter,
there are a WHOLE lot of products and, here on bitnet, a lot of very sound
public domain code.
As a programmer, UNIX intrigues me because I have more control over devices
(as a normal user). A few students share my interest but a lot feel that
UNIX is confusing and VMS is a little more straightforward. There are a
lot of pluses on the VMS side and a lot of UNIX folks like to throw sharp
objects at it, but most bounce off of VMS.
>
>Of course, after you go thru all this, then you'll have to convince
>him to run BSD over System V.
>
>At the very least, have him stage a test, in which some VMS and some
>UNIX systems are supported. See which one is preferred. At least you'll
>be able to salvage the hardware.
>
I won't take that as in insult to VMS, but it all depends on your
application. If you need a system for programmers and "tech-ies" then UNIX
would probably be your best bet. But, if you have a lot of users who don't
care about the nitty-gritties then a good systems manager and a few systems
programmers will work out rather nicely.
>> Thanks for your cooperation and knowledge. Is VMS that bad??
>
>Not if you enjoy banging your head against the wall.
I still have a round-ish head, no flat spots here.
>
> National Bureau of Standards
> Flamer's Hotline: (301) 975-5688
>FOOLED you! Absorb EGO SHATTERING impulse rays, polyester poltroon!!
- John Sottile
(jsott...@loyvax.bitnet)
Student Systems Manager
Student Systems Programmer
Loyola College in Maryland
Constuctive Criticism Welcomed.
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!gatech!
uflorida!codas!hdr!eric
From: e...@hdr.UUCP (Eric J. Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: VMS is not the evil empire
Message-ID: <707@hdr.UUCP>
Date: 7 Mar 88 14:51:12 GMT
References: <12067@brl-adm.ARPA>
Reply-To: e...@hdr.UUCP (Eric J. Johnson)
Organization: Amperif Corporation. Omaha, NE
Lines: 36
In article <12...@brl-adm.ARPA> JSOTTILE%LOYVAX.BIT...@cunyvm.cuny.edu writes:
> As far as support, our site has had *no* problems with getting
>help from DEC. In fact, I can call in at 1pm (usually the "busiest" times)
>and if the department that I have my question for is unavailable, i can
>expect a call from them within a hour or two.
We, too have had VERY good luck with DEC support, that is, as long as
it is one of our VMS VAXen that has problems...
Not too long ago, one of our Ultrix 1.2 730's lost its R80 drive. True
to form, their field service person arrived here within a few hours.
Diagnostics showed the drive bad, so a new one was shipped here over-nite.
The next day, the new drive was installed, diagnostics run on it (a-ok) and
we tried loading Ultrix. No luck, once bootstrapped from tape, Ultrix
rejected the new drive as bad. (I can't recall the exact message now)
While the local tech re-ran diagnostics, we got on the phone with the
Ultrix support people who (after some digging around: "now, where is that
IDC manual") were able to tell me that, yes indeed, the drive was bad.
Since the 'diagnostics' had told the tech that there was nothing wrong
with the drive, he was not, however inclined to believe the problem could
be there... Just to prove it, we boot VMS, it works just fine.
Well, after another few days of swapping boards in the new drive itself,
the local people brought out a drive they were using in their local
office. We boot Ultrix, *a miracle occurs*, the new drive works.
Amazing, one week to replace a disk drive.
What does this have to do with choosing VMS over Ultrix? Well, at least
in our area, one would probably receive better *local* support for VMS
than Ultrix. KEEP IN MIND I am referring to LOCAL support! Both VMS
and Ultrix 'OS' (long distance call) level support for us has been excellent.
--
Eric J. Johnson UUCP: e...@hdr.UUCP || ...!{ihnp4, codas}!hdr!eric
Amperif Corporation. CIS: 72460,11 BIX: ericj
My Previous Pontiac was a *Four-door* Tempest 326 Big Block V-8 (SO THERE!)
Crusher... Crusher? We don't need no Wesley Crusher!
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bu-cs!bzs
From: b...@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: VMS is not the evil empire
Message-ID: <20469@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 8 Mar 88 20:40:09 GMT
References: <12067@brl-adm.ARPA> <707@hdr.UUCP>
Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci.
Lines: 25
In-reply-to: eric@hdr.UUCP's message of 7 Mar 88 14:51:12 GMT
>What does this have to do with choosing VMS over Ultrix? Well, at least
>in our area, one would probably receive better *local* support for VMS
>than Ultrix. KEEP IN MIND I am referring to LOCAL support! Both VMS
>and Ultrix 'OS' (long distance call) level support for us has been excellent.
>
>--
>Eric J. Johnson UUCP: e...@hdr.UUCP || ...!{ihnp4, codas}!hdr!eric
DEC's pathological resistance to providing hardware service on Vaxes
running Ultrix or Unix is a good reason not to buy Vaxes, it's no
reason not to buy Unix which can be had from responsible vendors.
This has been known for years as the "We can't fix it because it runs
Unix(Ultrix)" DEC field service standard excuse #1. There are few
people who have tried to run Unix on vaxes who haven't run into this,
often in serious ways (like yours, down for a week to replace a disk
drive and the vendor resisting the solution.) I had a tty mux down for
weeks while they did this finger pointing (on a 780), the final
resolution was that there was no +5 volts on the backplane segment (it
had burned out, was actually charred when they took it apart.) Right,
musta been Unix's fault...it's just a good excuse that unfortunately
is accepted by their field service management.
-Barry Shein, Boston University
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!linus!philabs!nbc1!abs
From: a...@nbc1.UUCP (Andrew Siegel)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: VMS is not the evil empire
Message-ID: <418@nbc1.UUCP>
Date: 10 Mar 88 22:27:46 GMT
References: <12067@brl-adm.ARPA> <707@hdr.UUCP> <20469@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Reply-To: a...@nbc1.UUCP (Andrew Siegel)
Organization: NBC Computer Imaging, New York
Lines: 14
In article <20...@bu-cs.BU.EDU> b...@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
>DEC's pathological resistance to providing hardware service on Vaxes
>running Ultrix or Unix is a good reason not to buy Vaxes, it's no
>reason not to buy Unix which can be had from responsible vendors.
Correction (partial): DEC *does* support VAXes running ULTRIX.
We've had ULTRIX since June '85, and have had hardware support all
along.
They may not know what to *do* with ULTRIX, but at least they'll
service the machines.
--
Andrew Siegel, N2CN NBC Computer Imaging, New York, NY
{philabs,steinmetz,ge-dab}!nbc1!abs (212)664-5776
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!steinmetz!ge-dab!codas!pdn!reggie
From: reg...@pdn.UUCP (George W. Leach)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: VMS is not the evil empire
Message-ID: <2528@pdn.UUCP>
Date: 15 Mar 88 13:40:26 GMT
References: <12067@brl-adm.ARPA> <707@hdr.UUCP> <20469@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <418@nbc1.UUCP>
Reply-To: reg...@pdn.UUCP (George W. Leach)
Organization: Paradyne Corporation, Largo FL
Lines: 32
In article <4...@nbc1.UUCP> a...@nbc1.UUCP (Andrew Siegel) writes:
>In article <20...@bu-cs.BU.EDU> b...@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
>>DEC's pathological resistance to providing hardware service on Vaxes
>>running Ultrix or Unix is a good reason not to buy Vaxes, it's no
>>reason not to buy Unix which can be had from responsible vendors.
>
>Correction (partial): DEC *does* support VAXes running ULTRIX.
>We've had ULTRIX since June '85, and have had hardware support all
>along.
Well when I was with Bellcore our lab utilized Ultrix 1.0 on some
VAX 780's. I really don't remember how the hardware support was, but I
never heard any complaints. The complaints were on the software front.
In order for the system administrator to perform diagnostic tests, s/he
would first have to boot VMS!!! Another problem we had was that we were
sold a machine with 16 Mg of main memory. Ultrix only could address 8 Mg!
Now, of course all that has changed and it was their first attempt at
UNIX, but VMS was king and the Ultrix customers were well aware of it. That
led us to drop DEC and go with Pyramid and CCI for our development machines.
The experiences with DEC left a bad taste in people's mouths. Those kinds
of experiences are rather difficult to overcome, even if DEC has allegedly
changed their tune on Ultrix.
--
George W. Leach Paradyne Corporation
{gatech,rutgers,attmail}!codas!pdn!reggie Mail stop LF-207
Phone: (813) 530-2376 P.O. Box 2826
Largo, FL 34649-2826
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!rick
From: r...@seismo.CSS.GOV (Rick Adams)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: VMS is not the evil empire
Message-ID: <44265@beno.seismo.CSS.GOV>
Date: 16 Mar 88 19:10:47 GMT
References: <12067@brl-adm.ARPA> <707@hdr.UUCP> <20469@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <181@mcf.UUCP>
Organization: Center for Seismic Studies, Arlington, VA
Lines: 18
Summary: alternative to dec maintenance
If you are unhappy with the way DEC maintenance jerks you around because
you run UNIX, you might consider having Control Data maintain your
DEC equipment (yes CDC does do DEC maintenance).
We switched to CDC a few years ago and have no regrets. The service is
better, they don't bitch about unix (although they occasionally ask
for help in interpreting some of the more obscure unix error messages.
I find that quite acceptable), and they ended up saving us quite
a bit of money over DEC maintenance. (Money was not the
major issue. Response time and ineptness of service once they
actually responded was a big factor)
I don't know if DEC maintenance has improved locally in the past few
years, but we have no reason to try them and see.
(We are running "real" 4.3bsd as opposed to Ultrix, etc)
---rick
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!steinmetz!dawn!stpeters
From: stpet...@dawn.steinmetz (Dick St.Peters)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: VMS is not the evil empire
Message-ID: <10009@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Date: 18 Mar 88 18:55:34 GMT
References: <12067@brl-adm.ARPA> <707@hdr.UUCP> <20469@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <418@nbc1.UUCP>
<2528@pdn.UUCP>
Sender: n...@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP
Reply-To: dawn!stpet...@steinmetz.UUCP (Dick St.Peters)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 25
In article <2...@pdn.UUCP> reg...@pdn.UUCP (George W. Leach) writes:
> Well when I was with Bellcore our lab utilized Ultrix 1.0 on some
>VAX 780's. ...
>
> Now, of course all that has changed and it was their first attempt at
>UNIX, ...
It was more like their zero'th attempt. When we got Ultrix 1.0, we
bought source - and paid a bundle for it. It looked a bit familiar -
in fact, it was essentially identical to the BSD 4.2 source we already
had. After dozens of diffs, the only difference I ever found was in
the kernel source: DEC had replaced one BSD macro with a procedure.
Management bought installation, but when the FE showed up to do the
install, we already had Ultrix running. Good thing too, 'cuz the FE
had never installed it.
However, DEC has come a long way since then, and instead of bashing
them for taking so long to get on the UNIX bandwagon, shouldn't we be
welcoming them aboard?
--
Dick St.Peters
GE Corporate R&D, Schenectady, NY
stpet...@ge-crd.arpa
uunet!steinmetz!stpeters
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!m2c!ulowell!bbn!bbn.com!rsalz
From: rs...@bbn.com (Rich Salz)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: VMS is not the evil empire
Message-ID: <533@fig.bbn.com>
Date: 19 Mar 88 16:56:00 GMT
References: <12067@brl-adm.ARPA> <707@hdr.UUCP> <20469@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <418@nbc1.UUCP>
<2528@pdn.UUCP> <10009@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Organization: BBN Laboratories, Cambridge MA
Lines: 19
Dick St.Peters <stpet...@ge-crd.arpa> writes:
However, DEC has come a long way since then, and instead of bashing
them for taking so long to get on the UNIX bandwagon, shouldn't we be
welcoming them aboard?
Excellent point!
They're obviously still lacking in some areas (no nameserver -- hell, when
one of their own engineers wrote BIND! -- makes Ultrix all but unuseable
on the Internet), but by all their statements, and from DEC presentations
I've been to, they know they're lagging (I heard someone admit it :-), and
they seem real sincere in their catch-up efforts.
Complaints about specific field offices posted to a world-wide network
are probably less effective at causing change than a sharp well-worded
letter sent to the regional office.
/r$
--
Please send comp.sources.unix-related mail to rs...@uunet.uu.net.