On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Sean Conner wrote:
What I've read about VMS makes me think the networking was incredible.


To be fair, I think you have to think about what was around when VMS was developed, and what DEC was competing with. VMS is an enterprise-grade operating system, designed for serious production work. At the time VMS was conceived, Unix was a university product, used for teaching and research, not for heavy production work. In fact those early versions of Unix were completely useless for that kind of application - too limited, unstable, and no useful security features. No accounting at all, no useful batch functionality, nothing but the most basic kind of security and protection functionality etc.

VMS was designed to compete with IBM mainframes and System/32-34-36 and the likes.

In the early 80s I used both VMS version 4 and 5 and Unix version 7. The Unix system was used for program development, the VMS system for program development and running accounting software. The Unix system was fine for program development in a lab but far too unstable and insecure for running accounting systems in a corporate production environment.

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