why learn UNIX

[robert at jimi.UUCP]

In article <5585 at brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
>In article <4221 at utah-cs.UUCP> cetron at utah-cs.UUCP (Edward J Cetron) writes:
>>->tr '\t ' '\n' | sort | uniq | comm -23 - /usr/lib/dict/wordlist
>>  Now, explain to me why if I can do this on my UNIX machine  AND I can 
>>  do it on my VMS  machine, why UNIX is better than VMS.
>The only reason you can run this on your VMS system is that all the
>necessary parts were lifted from UNIX.  The early releases of VMS
>certainly did not support anything of the sort.  Actually it rather
>surprises me that the current release of VMS does.  Or are you
>running the Software Tools VOS or DEC-Shell instead of DCL?

I have never understood this argument.  People are always telling me
"well, VMS doesn't have make".  On my system it does.  They then go on a
long tirade about how it was invented on unix, and VMS only has it because
they "lifted it" from UNIX.   So what?  A good idea is a good idea, who
cares that it was on system x first.  As it happens, I like UNIX a lot,
but there are features on VMS that are lacking on UNIX, and for certain
environments a VMS type system is better.

I can tell you however, that the above command will not work on a vanilla
VMS system.  IPC is easily done on VMS, it is not done via DCL, however
as has been mentioned before, just as there are several shells available
for UNIX systems, there are several for VMS.  What sort of response do
you suppose I'd get if I complained that BSD 4.0 has no networking
support, that V6 has no job control etc.  What VMS was lacking 10 years
ago is irrelevant.

					--robert

--
Disclaimer:  I like unix better than VMS!!!

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