How do Unix and VMS compare?

[Henry Spencer]

> 	A stinking minor version change breaks the whole world.  Already
> there are two different Unixes.

No, there aren't.  There is Unix, and there is a hodge-podge from
Berkeley that calls itself Unix but isn't.  Don't be taken in by
misleading advertising.  At Usenix I wore (part of the time) a button
saying "4.2BSD does everything UNIX does, only differently.".

> 	Often things don't work.  The "bugs" section on every manual page
> is a real loser, since no one seems to fix things, and if they did, that
> might break someone's program that depends on the bug.

The difference is that VMS doesn't bother documenting the bugs.  As for
"no one seems to fix things", this is sometimes true of DEC as well.

> .......  Imagine this situation; I have invested zillions of dollars in an
> application (running under 4.1) that has become essential, and it won't run
> under 4.2.  This can also happen in VMS land, but is much less likely.

If you try to port things from a more-or-less Unix (e.g. 4.1) to a system
that claims to be Unix but isn't (4.2), of course you're going to run
into trouble.  Stuff written for V7 will run on damn near any Unix in
existence, across an immense spectrum of hardware.  I speak from some
experience on this;  U of T and its friends are *not* all-Dec shops by
any stretch of the imagination.

> ...................................................  We wrote IP and UDP
> for VMS, so we can communicate in a primitive fashion over the ethernet
> (I'm sorry, but UUCP is just a little too mickey mouse for me.  I've had
> to use it, and I hate it).  Much of this software is available, or soon
> becoming available.

There are any number of people selling non-primitive Ethernet software
for Unix already.  Writing your own for Unix is unnecessary.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry