Help us defend against VMS!

[Dave Sill]

[I tried to sit on my hands when this thread got started, but this was
the last straw.]

>   - VMS documentation blows UNIX documentation out of the water...

Hah.  The only thing the VMS manuals have over the man pages is bulk.
I find them exceedingly verbose.  If I want to read a novel, by golly
I'll read a novel, but when I want to use a command, I want the facts.

Not that there are no deficiencies in the man pages...

>   - The editors on VMS (TPU especially) are quite powerful.

Hah, again.  TPU is a half-baked attempt at an emacs-like editor.
Fortunately, real emacs is available for just about every machine.

But really, there is one difference between VMS and Unix that is so
overwhelmingly important that it just can't be overemphasized, so
I'll repeat it: VMS is proprietary, Unix is not.  At any time, DEC can
make any arbitrary decisions it wants to about the future of VMS.
They could decide tomorrow to stop supporting it (of course they may
have support contracts that they have to honor).  What would happen if
DEC went bankrupt?  Or was bought out (however unlikely)?

But nothing like this could happen to Unix.  Unix is far bigger than
any of the vendors supporting it.  Yes even AT&T has limited power to
change UNIX's destiny.

So why put all your eggs in one basket and let somebody else hold it?

=========
The opinions expressed above are mine.

"The present-day computer world stinks.  What we see out there is an
unholy mess; thousands of incompatible files and programs created by
artificial distinctions between program type."
					-- Ted Nelson