On Jul 16, 2016, at 7:55 AM, Noel Chiappa <j...@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote: > >> From: Jonas > >> At the time VMS was conceived, Unix was a university product, used for >> teaching and research, not for heavy production work. > > Err, not quite. In the mid-70's, the PWB system at Bell: > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX > > was being used by a community of about 1K programmers doing development of > software for various Bell commercial projects. > > Yes, not accounting systems, but not "teaching and research", either. And it > was definitely production: see the uptime statistics, etc, in the BSTJ > article that describes it.
I was involved in a department that had university research on one side and business on the other as well in the late 70’s and 80’s. The basic science analysis ran on PDP-11 with UNIX variants mostly Ultrix-11, Venix and some V7. Data acquisition was RT-11/TSX+ on LSI-11’s with custom hardware, handlers and interfaces. The business was PDP-11’s + RSX-11, then VAXen and VMS. Both sides did programing on Fortran and C. Separate from the license issues in that era, we generally would have not considered using the UNIX for the business side. While we had or could get the technical skills to do coding for applications, the overall support depth/response from the vendors and its operational design was not sufficient for a small operation. If the application, media or OS crashed, we needed to recover quickly and not risk permanent loss of more than a few minutes of transactions. I recall more than a few crashes on the Unix side where the file system and data recovery was not straightforward. Even on then small disk drives that used 60-250 Mbytes, fsck’ing could take over an hour. The academics could afford to put a grad student on sorting though the data loss and trying to recover missing data from multiple tapes. Software development was slower under VMS, but the overall experience was robust. We generally chose the tool that got the job done without too many culture wars. Before I let we had much of the research on NeXTSTEP or OpenStep. Steve definitely delivered a tool the academics could exploit and we did so at every layer of that product. Jerry
