Re: In the Shallow End

"GreyCloud" <mist@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:yImdnTZfVdzT2kPZnZ2dnUVZ_uudnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Dan Johnson wrote:
What are these wonderful DEC development tools you
refer to? When I used VMS- many years ago in my misspent
youth- the development tools were not impressive at all.

Their languages were complete and well documented. Their libraries were
complete and well documented without leaving anything out that one might
want.

MS usually manages this. I don't recall VMS docs being
especially good, though. Better than Unix man pages, sure,
but what isn't?

Ex: you can open a file as indexed and key on anything you want to do.

Yes, I know about RMS. It has no relevance to my
question that I can see.

Back then MS never had anything like it. You had to roll your own
custom database back then.

MS offers several database products today for your databasing
pleasure. Modern relational databases kick the tar out of the old
indexed filesystems, like what VMS had.

I could also mix language very easily under VMS. All I had to do was
link all the object modules together to make a complete program from using
the various strengths of each language. Their stack frame was
standardized, unlike what MS had pushed out where some languages you had
to futz with the stack first.

Ya, this was a nice thing about VMS, but .NET goes
beyond it. It provides seamless interoperability for
objects, not just procedures.

What was the deal in MS Fortran where you had to use [HUGE] or [LARGE] or
[SMALL] and other non standard labels? Then they had to preface a call
saying that the subroutine was in pascal. I never had to do this in vms.
DEC made it dirt easy.

That stuff about HUGE, LARGE and SMALL was there
to support the 80286, and its craptacular segmented memory
model. They had to do extensions like that for all their
languages back then.

But today, you don't need them and they compile away to
nothing.

Way back in the 16-bit days, MS called their standard calling
convention (they did have one!) the "pascal convention", which
was confusing. With Win32 they renamed it "stdcall", which is
unpronouncible. Pick yer poison.

Anyway, it still seems a non-sequitur. MS has dropped
a very old language- Fortran- for a shiny new one- C#. This
seems to suggest forward motion on their part.

Intel just wrote Fortran 2003.

Presumably "just wrote" means "three years ago", right? :D

There is a very good reason to use fortran where numeric accuracy has to
be kept and flagged when you lose that accuracy. That was the purpose of
many languages on one main frame in the older days. Each language had its
own strengths and weaknesses.

Yes. FORTRAN still has the most manic optimizers,
for numerical computing.

[snip]
I do not think MS can be blamed for Apple mistakes,
nor those of the Unix vendors. If Apple did not produce
great products sooner, that's *Apple's* fault. They wasted
a lot of time and effort producing not much in the mid
nineties.

Let me put it a different way. Back before IBM made the PC, there were
many micro-computer makers that were rolling out some nice machines that
could do multi-user/multi-tasking at a low cost. Then along came the IBM
PC.

I take a less rosy view of this period.

Back then, innovations could only occur at the
level of the whole computer. The Amiga had
nifty graphics accelerator hardware. The Mac
had a nifty GUI.

But to deliver this, Commodore had to build
the Amiga; and Apple the Mac.

Today an innovation can be deployed without
shipping a whole new computer to host it. This
is a great advance. And it's Windows that makes
it possible.

(OK, the open architecture of the PC deserves
some credit too. But Windows was the missing
link to make it actually work.)

Everybody jumped over there due to Big Blues influence. Everybody was
hoping for some of that mainframe technology to filter down to the PC...
it never happened.

Sure it did. It just took awhile.

Every one waited a decade for MS to come out with a multi-tasking o/s
that never showed up.

NT is here now. Hell, they even shipped the OS/2 that
they promised, though that didn't pan out too well.

By then most of the other vendors died out leaving the public with
MS-DOS. That's what I mean by stagnation.
The industry was pushed back a decade and shouldn't have happened.

It's only pushed back if you *desired* the mess that
was the computer industry in the 80s. I don't think
many people would desire that.

[snip]
This is an excellent development. Microsoft is at its best
when competing with other vendors. During the period that
MS was unchallenged, they spent their time animating ordinary
office products with a perverse unlife.

In this case, MS went out of their way to derail Java by incorporating
their own changes to Java... which led to a lawsuit.

Just to quibble: they were trying to derail Sun's
plans. They had other plans for Java, and didn't (then)
intend to kill it.

Of course, if you care about politics more than technology,
that will seem to be a distinction without a difference.

[snip]


.

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