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, DECWORLD Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984
[It's been argued that the beauty of UNIX is the same as the beauty of Ken
Olsen's brain. Ed.]
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, DECWORLD Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984
[It's been argued that the beauty of UNIX is the same as the beauty of Ken
Olsen's brain. Ed.]
Related:
- One of the questions that comes up all the time i
How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX? Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago.... - The beauty of UNIX is that it's simple;
and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there.
-- DECWORLD Volume 8, number 5... - empire n.
Any of a family of military simulations derived
from a game written by Peter Langston many years ago.
A number of multi-player variants of varying degrees of sophistication exist, and one single-player version implemented for both Unix and VMS... - VMS: /V-M-S/ n. DEC's proprietary operating system for its VAX
minicompute
one of the seven or so environments that loom largest in hacker folklore.... - Mars n.
A legendary tragic failure, the archetypal Hacker
Dream Gone Wrong.
Mars was the code name for a family of PDP-10 compatible computers built by Systems Concepts (now, The SC Group)... - Unix conspiracy n.
[ITS] According to a conspiracy theory
long popular among ITS and TOPS-20 fa
Unix's growth is the result of a plot, hatched during the 1970s at Bell Labs, whose intent was to hobble AT&... - clone n.
1. An exact duplicate: "Our product is a clone of
their product.
Implies a legal reimplementation from documentation or by reverse-engineering....
