Re: In the Shallow End

"GreyCloud" <mist@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:MIqdner9-IB39ULZnZ2dnUVZ_uudnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Dan Johnson wrote:

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

The DEC docs are legendary. Maybe it is because you were given a simple
account and weren't given the huge set of docs to read.

If you say so. I haven't read them. But I find your account
very vague; I still don't understand what about them made
them so good.

The DEC docs were very accurate, while the MS ones were not. Plus there
were many needed simple functions that just didn't exist with MS.

What simple functions are those?

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.

Hah. MS never included it in their file system structure.

Of course not. It is obsolete.

I found it to be a very big plus using VMS. Built right in.

MS provides relational database tools instead; much nicer
that some old ISAM.

And that's what RMS was, once you get past the
filesystem integration.

There were so many conveniences in VMS that were outright non-existent in
the MS o/s that it is amazing why anyone would want to use any MS products
or even UNIX products.

Could you be more specific about this? What conveniences
are you thinking of?

[snip]
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.

Back then, MS didn't have a thing close to it.

Doesn't RMS predate MS's founding?

And they still don't.

No-one would want to, now. Technology has
moved on.

Why else do the real pros on Wallstreet use VMS as the main transaction
engines then and not MS?

Very probably inertia. VMS is a great OS, and I don't mean
to downplay it, but if they are still using RMS files for
they transtion engines, it's because they haven't bothered
to upgrade- if not to Windows, then at least to a relational
database.

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

.NET is a mess according to others accounts and appears to be a dying
concept.

I do not know what a "dying concept" is, but it is a very
nice programming environment, and it plays a large
role in MS's future plans for Windows.

[snip]
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.

That wasn't the only kluge that MS had to bolt on.

I'm sure you're right.

[snip]
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.

Why bother, when VMS had their stuff straight from the git-go?

Because VMS is missing a lot of stuff MS
has; like the .NET stuff I just mentioned.

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

Guffaw!! Scientific computing appears to not be your forte.

Indeed not. Has some other language surpassed
FORTRAN while I was not looking? If so, which one?

[snip]
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.

The Amiga was the only one out there that offered multi-tasking and good
color graphics at that time.

That too. It was awful hard to bring that stuff to
the PC or the Mac. It was done, but it took a long,
long time. With Windows, you just drop in a card,
and install the driver for it. And it works.

The death of the Amiga was caused by poor management and their lack of
understanding of NOT to enter competition with MS DOS by producing a PC
clone. Had they not, they might still be around... but they are not.

I can't parse that. Certainly I agree that Commodore's
management had much to do with that companies fall.

But I submit that to save Commodore would have
taken as much effort as it did to save Apple. More
than just competant management was needed.

[snip]
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.

Windows is too steeped in backward compatibility to allow it to be trully
innovative.

I find notions of "true" and "false" innovation somewhat
slippery. But the point here is not that Windows is
innovating much, but that it is a platform on which
others can innovate.

[snip]
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.

Yes, over a decade... then win3.1 finally came out and bits and pieces of
the main frame environment started to show up about the time NT was named
win2000. But even these are not true multi-user environments,
excluding the win2003 server of course.

Hmmm. The usual count against NT in this area was that
in its first release, it was "multi-user" for CLI users, but
only one GUI user could be logged on at a time.

Not so good for timesharing.

The first Windows that supported timesharing with
a GUI for each user was NT 4, Terminal Services
Edition. That would appear to be the bit of mainframe
tech you are talking about.

Now it is steeped in buzz words that have no real meaning or connection
for anyone these days.

Whadayamean, "now"? MS has always been
fond of buzzwordery.

In this, MS has muddied the waters so bad that people are now losing
interest.

They've never had Apple's talent for PR, I must
admit.

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

It wasn't what people wanted, and were too late in delivering it.
Multi-tasking executives were available, yet MS never delivered one in the
mid 80s. Even the el-cheapo Coco from Tandy had OS9 for it.
MS should have delivered multi-tasking in their 3.0 version of MS DOS.
It would have been the next logical step.

I think MS's long range planing was vidicated by events, really:
they did ship all that stuff, and they brought the industry with
them. It just took time.

[snip]
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.

No, they didn't want to kill it... they wanted it for themselves... you
know... steal by stealth.

If you like. But that would have saved Java as a technology
from the dead end into which Sun was guiding it.

MS failed, of course. Java has become trapped
in its application-server niche, and will probably
die there in time.

Too bad. It was a great idea.

[snip]
All it really is ... inertia. Steve Jobs knows this so is doing the next
best thing... build a better product for the masses and make it easier to
use than the competitors product.

There is much in what you say, so I've snipped it. :D

But I'll object to this: Apple does *not* make computers
for the masses. They make computers for the elite.

The masses, as ever, want cheap computers and don't
care that much about quality, still less style.



.

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