Old Microsoft stuff...

From: Huw Davies <H.Davies_at_latrobe.edu.au>
Date: Wed Jun 17 21:04:27 1998

At 07:50 AM 17-06-98 -0700, Max Eskin wrote:

>What was so "interesting" about it? Who made it, why, and when?
>>
>>>Don't forget Eunice! OK, maybe it's better that you forget.
>>
>>Sounds of VMS administrator running screaming around the office. I
>thought
>>I'd got over that "interesting" piece of software, but clearly not :-)

Well there were a number of issues involved with running Eunice (which was
Unix
on top of VMS).

The first problem was that of speed. We used to run Eunice on a VAX-11/785
which (for it's time) was a fast VAX, but then layering all of Unix on top
meant for a slightly slow Unix.

Then there was file system problems - the VMS file system and the Unix file
system are slightly different :-)

Finally compatibility - it was "hard/impossible/requires several
miracles/harder than that" to get many of the programs that our users
wanted to run. Eventually we purchased a uVAX-11 running Ultrix-32 and let
the users loose in the Unix playpen.

Of course, in those days we didn't believe that Unix was anything more than
something that Computer Science people used. It wasn't VMS so we weren't
really interested in supporting it, or bothering to learn enough to make it
work better than it did.

Imagine, 10 years later and we're about to order two very large Unix
systems for administrative processing. (Two DEC 8400s with 4CPUs and 6Gb of
memory each).

 Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies_at_latrobe.edu.au
 Information Technology Services | Phone: +61 3 9479 1550 Fax: +61 3 9479
1999
 La Trobe University | "If God had wanted soccer played in the
 Melbourne Australia 3083 | air, the sky would be painted green"
Received on Wed Jun 17 1998 - 21:04:27 BST