Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors 435

Sigh! I'm not talking about a file on the system. I'm talking about a file system that is arranged based on RMS.

IIRC, you're too young. :-)

Exactly! That is precisely the arrogance I am talking about. Despite the FACT that all of our customers had mixed product lines and the FACT that even the VMS devlopers had to move their bits from other kinds of operating systems, they still had the f***ing arrogance of insisting that our customers had to do VMS::VMS.

This is the atbreastude that end any customer loyalty we had spent years building up. When you treat people, who are more sophisticated in using computers than you are, as f***ing idiots who don't their butt from a 3-way plug, they will go elsewhere with their purchase requisitions because they know nothing they say will have any influence with deliver computing hard-software to them.

I know it's used that way; that doesn't make it timesharing.

I don't confuse anything. I am talking about DEC's insistence that any VMS system was a 1:1 replacement for all PDP-10s.

Aha! So you do know some flavor of the difference.

Exactly. And you can't mix apples and nuts w.r.t. memory management. They are different OS philosophies. What management back then was trying to do was shipping a hammer with the mistaken idea that customers would then use it for traveling back and forth to work.

But not all at the same time!!! This is what general purpose timesharing is supposed to do. The original VMS was an either-or system and did not adjust its computing service to each user; it adjust its computing service to each sysadmin.

Sigh! I must be speaking in Martian. My point is that one doesn't kill the 10-20's business until you have a viable replacement up and running and delivering computing services better and more than what you're replacing. There should also be a well-documented plan for moving customers from old to new. DEC did this exactly backwards.

If possible, and it was very possible, moving from one flavor of system to another flavor should have been invisible to all users. One way to have done this was to have a login setting that would say, "I want to speak in TOPS-10ese." And the user would just do his-her work without ever having to know that the hardware and OS wasn't a 10.

All of Bob Supnik's work in the last 10 years, should have been shipping to our customers in 1980, if not before. This, of course, buttumes that corporate policy was to converge on one underlying OS because it was cheaper to develop-maintain one OS. I'm still not convinced that this was true but then I wasn't a beancounter.

BAH

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