Re: Exploring DEC Rdb/VMS

From: Laconic2 <laconic2_at_comcast.net>
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2004 09:02:21 -0400
Message-ID: <6LWdnUC73IJ3huzcRVn-jA_at_comcast.com>


"Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote in message news:kL8cd.480574$8_6.169191_at_attbi_s04...

> I go back far enough to have spent a fair bit of time on both BSD on
> the VAX and VMS, so I certainly know the plural of "vax!" :-) Some
> of my first actually-useful software work was done on Software Tools
> on VMS at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. We had a 780. It was about
> 20 feet long. It had 300 megabyte hard disks the size of washing
> machines. It had an eight inch boot floppy. It had a dedicated
> machine room with elevated floor and hardcore A/C; there
> were phones in the machine room but you couldn't use them
> because you couldn't hear anything over the fan sounds.

My introduction to the VAX was harsh. I was a digit at the time, and I had a lot of expertise in the 36 bit line of computers.

When the VAX first came out, they said that it was for scientists and engineers, and the 36 bit line was going to remain the flagship for commercial applications. Then they came out with VAX COBOL, and we knew we had been betrayed (see LOTR appendixes)! So I got to go from "Operating System guru" to "poor dumb jerk: doesn't know what to do after logging in!" I've gotten to make that transition several times in my career.

I set out to learn the instruction set of the VAX, but I got bored. Everything was the same, only different. A friend taught me an acronym: Relegate the Instruction Set to the Compiler (RISC). So I moved on to a different layer: I learned Datatrieve and Pascal. Between those two, you could do all the relational and procedural manipulation necessary, and that held me over until Rdb came out. I was ready.

My role at VAX sites was very peculiar. There were very few people who knew Rdb as well as I did, but understood the guts of the VAX as little as I did. It wasn't that I was incompetent to learn that stuff. It was just a case of BTDT. I never did learn the VAX debugger, although it was better than the corresponding debugger in the 36 bit world. Instead, I focussed on Dijkstra and Wirth's methods for avoiding bugs to begin with. I figured that eventually I would be forced to learn the debugger. It never happened.

I didn't learn how to "program in DCL" until I was truly backed into a corner. Then I found out that it was a lot cooler than I had imagined. Received on Sat Oct 16 2004 - 15:02:21 CEST

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