As I read a lot of the anti-Linux/Unix comments, I frequently
recall that I heard the same thing from the VMS crowd 15 years ago.
I could almost do a "s/NT/VMS/" and come up with exact quotes.
So I thought I'd go dig this up and present it as food for thought:
One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How
enthusiastic is our support for UNIX?
Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many
years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our
machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use.
UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy to get
started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat
casual users, and it's great for interchanging programs between
different machines. And so, because of its popularity in these
markets, we support it. We have good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX
on PDP-11s.
It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will
run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real
system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious
about programming.
With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and
quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not
there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally
a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough
it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX is
it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there.
-- Ken Olsen, President of DEC, 1984
Of course, Olsen never did catch on, and his continued insistence that
DEC pour resources into VMS instead of committing 100% to Unix is
one of the principal reasons that companies like Sun found a market.
It's also one of the main reasons that DEC, at one time one of the most
powerful companies in the business, no longer exists.
VMS had everything going for it: the backing of a dominant player
in the game, market share, a zillion applications, certification
programs, formal support mechanisms, and so on. But it still lost,
and lost badly.
It's gonna happen all over again. Wait and watch.
---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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