Help us defend against VMS!

[Thomas Truscott]

In article <1636 at tulum.UUCP>, hirai at swatsun.uucp (Eiji "A.G." Hirai) writes:
> 	Is VMS as horrible as I suspect or am I alone an thinking this?

VMS is a fine OS.  Any campus should have a few VMS systems.
But your campus should primarily run UN*X.
This partly because UNIX is wonderful and partly because
UNIX has become so widespread that it should be chosen
even when clearly deficient.  (E.g. people still choose FORTRAN.)

1.  As a University, it is absolutely mandatory to make UNIX
the major academic operating system.
* undergraduates should use it because it is what they
    will use when they graduate.
* graduate computer science/engineering students can study,
    and even modify the UNIX OS.
    Thousands of students have learned how to write operating
    systems by studying UNIX.  Not true of VMS!
    Consider MIT (Project Athena), CMU (Mach OS, and Andrew),
    University of Califorina at Berkeley (3.0 BSD and so on).
    Consider the following major academic software projects:
    Sprite, Locus, TimeWarp, (forget this, consider *almost any*
    recent major academic software project!).
    UNIX had a major role in every one.
* Look at the CS faculty recruiting ads in the back of the
    Communications of the ACM, and count how often UNIX is mentioned.
    Can you even *find* a mention of VMS?
* What about the non-CS students and faculty?  If they want
    innovative uses of computing they will find it on UNIX.
    Mostly they will want word processing, and that is on UNIX too.
    (But a SUN or Mac or PC clone is cheaper for that than a VAX.
    Whatever you pick can run UNIX.  VMS only runs on a VAX.)

2.  As a strategic computing decision, you must pick UNIX,
because it is becoming a world-wide standard operating system.
It can run on nearly every computer from the smallest home systems
to the Cray 2.  Virtually every newly designed computer
has UNIX as the standard (if not the only) operating system.
Older operating systems will persist, of course,
but their vendors now provide UNIX alternatives.
In particular there are vendor-supplied UNIX alternatives to IBM MVS,
DEC VMS, Apollo Domain, Prime OS, DG AOS, Gould MPX, and Apple MacOS.

Any "tactical" gain from chosing VAX VMS initially will quickly
lose to (a) improvements in VAX UNIX (e.g. DEC's Ultrix) and
(b) improvements in the UNIX computing world in general.

3. DECnet is a limited network, limited mainly to Vaxen.
TCP/IP is currently the obvious choice for networked laser-printers,
terminal concentrators, and so on.
As other choices become obvious UNIX will have them,
and will have them before any other operating system does.
(UNIX already has several networking alternatives, such as XNS.)
Ultrix has DECnet, but it should be used only
to communicate with your VMS systems.

==========
Some non-technical notes:

Your computing services manager may already have committed to VMS,
so this may be a pointless battle.  Unless you have something to lose,
though, you should have a long chat with "him" anyway
as he should know what he will be up against later.

Survey other colleges similar to yours
(maybe just scan faculty recruiting ads as mentioned above) 
and see what they are doing about computing.
Your manager probably has done so, make up your own list.

Ever since VAX was built, the UNIX vs. VMS question has been asked.
I have about 200 kilobytes of answers (mostly in favor of UNIX!)
for everything from real time to office automation.
As time goes by, the answers change.  And it is mostly
due to the tidal wave of UNIX engulfing the computing world,
making the smaller technical details completely irrelevant.
For example, past claims such as "FOO runs only on VMS" took time to answer,
now it is simply "DEC shipped/will ship FOO on Ultrix last/next summer."
>From what I heard at the Ultrix BOF at the last Usenix conference,
DEC is now committed to equal development/support of new products
on both VMS and UNIX, which may benefit both systems
by encouraging competition between the two porting teams.

	Tom Truscott