RE: desupport - end of an era

> Why? I started out on VMS MANY years ago, VAX/VMS. When DEC

I started on a DECSystem 20 running TOPS-20. When the VAX 4000 series (I'm ashamed I forgot which!) came in, I hated it. Whatdya mean I can't just hit TAB for command completion? DCL? Ewww! It's so complex! Of course I learned to love it (via the Orange Wall) and see why VMS was superior in many many ways.

Then came Alpha. The CPU came out of the gate at 150Mhz which was blazing in the day. A rough ride on the conversion, but that shear speed was worth it.

Only problem was that big companies were writing for Unixes first, then trying to port to VMS. One main difference between the two OSs is that process creation is relatively quite expensive compared to Unix, but the ports never quite got that. It made them slow in comparison and it seems that the wonderful OS took quite a beating for that.

DCL and the OS overall was (is?) very elegant compared to any Unix shell scripting. There's true error handling. There's no need to haphazardly parse program output that can change depending on when it's run (e.g. idiotic date formats from ls) since there was an actual API. Bullet-proofing scripts was really quite easy in comparison.

> I remember one Oracle or IOUG article which stated that "DBA's
> should be the agents of change". Well here you are, your now an agent
> of change.

Yup. While I really miss the power and elegance of DCL, I'll never have to deal with running out of NPAGEDYN ever again.

> BTW: We have A VMS server here, no support folks in
> operations, and I can't wait till it hits the dumpster. (Kept me up all
> night Tuesday when it decided to fry a couple of CPU's.)

The OS didn't cause that CPU to fry...just sayin'. :)

I finally recycled my Alphastation 500, Sun Ultra 5, and Sun Ultra 10 just a few months ago. I'm sure the "geek" at the big box store didn't know what they were.

Rich

Disclaimer: Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for m'shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Gimme five bees for a quarter, you'd say. Now where was I? Oh yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion tied to my belt, which was the style at the time. You couldn't get white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...

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