From: SMTP%"drickard@technet2000.com.au" 13-NOV-1996 19:29:15.63 To: "Glenn C. Everhart 603 881 1497" CC: Subj: Re: cp/m format helpme - CP/M AME for VMS Glenn, > "Overqualified"?? Hmm. Right now, there are plenty o' folks round > here looking for people;there have been many departures, but not at DEC's > behest, and they're looking to find folks in a big way. Would that this > would have the desired effect (ie, some real respect all over DEC for > the product...VMS in this case..., better money for engineers to show > they mean it, more response to engineer input, etc.) but till we start > seeing marketing change, not many of us will believe the sincerity of > statements about upper mfg > oops mgt support for VMS. Damn shame what;'s > been going on. Yes, the whole thing at DEC pissed me off. I worked as part of the DEC team at MIT on project Athena. In fact John Kohl and I were the joint authors of the Kerberos V5 specification after I had shown him how to break V4, and I had only been at MIT for a week then, and my only knowledge of Unix was a 1 week "Introduction to Unix" coyurse I had done at LA on the way across. They had absolutely no idea of the features that were already in VMS. Thats what drove me to write the TCSH shell for Unix because the system management features were so poor. I just wrote it to solve a problem we had at MIT. I was no Unix guru, and my knowledge of C was minimal, but it was still easy to write a shell that had more features than all the existing ones. Next thing I know DEC is distributing it with the official Ultrix distributions. Real pain in the arse actually. People still contactinmg me about it. Then in Feb-1989 I went to the USENIX symposium in San Diego. All these real Unix gurus. Each day they had a 'wish list' of features they would like to see in Unix, and on the final Friday they prioritised the list for final submission, e.g. sharable libraries, etc. Some clown in the audience got up and pointed out that the top 6 items in the list had been part of VMS since 1978, so why didn't they just add the VMS features and call it VMS. Went over like a lead balloon........ About 1991, shortly after I got back to Australia from MIT the IREEE was putting on a talk by a bloke who at the time was CEO of Unix International (UI). During his talk I pulled him up on a few points of fact, so when the meeting finished he asked me to stay for a while. We got talking, and I told him about my involvement with VMS, MIT etc etc. Then he came out with a statement that absolutely floored me. He said, and I quote " ...if DEC had made VMS available on other platforms, there would never have been a need for Unix, and Unix would never have existed". Yep, that was from the CEO of UI. Even he admitted that VMS was a far superior product. Current DEC marketing couldn't even give away $20 notes. About 6 weeks I happened to be having a talk with one of the DEC salesmem from Sydney. "yes", he said, ".. for 2 years now DEC has been up there at the top with client/server computing, and has nothing to apologise for". I pointed out to him that in fac DEC had been one of the major pioneers of client/server computing, and that DECnet right from its announcement date in August-1976 in Melbourne, Australia (yes, 20 years this year ....another anniversary forgotten...) was client server based. He couldn't believe it. In fact I used to do some amazing things with RSTS/E and client server systems. RSTS/E had a feature called "multi terminal support" so one program could drive multiple terminals. It was really just a method of multi-threading. I wrote a multi-threaded file server system for RSTS/E in 1976 that supported dozens of slave PDP-11, Motorola 6800, Intel 8080, etc. All could even down load their initialisation code from the server. Nothing new under the sun. Talking abut RSTS/E, can you tell me something. Even though I was not working with DEC at the time, I was regarded world wide as a bit of a RSTS/E guru. About 1975/76 DEC sent me under a non-disclosure agreement an experimental CLI for RSTS/E. It turned out to implement what became known as DCL, and was apparently supposed to be a test platform for DCL for VMS. I only had it for test for about 2 months, and had to send back a report on the features, failings, etc. I have for years being trying to tell other DEC people that this DCL run time environment existed for RSTS/E before VMS appeared on the scene, but no one seems to believe me because they never saw it themselves. I cannot for the life of me remember what the piece of software was called, but would like to get some details of it. I have recently been asked by the Australian Computer Museum Society (ACMS) to write up my memoirs for them, because my progress in computing in Australia over the last 30 or so years was so closely intertwined with the growth of general computing in Australia. I would like to mention that experimental system, but lack a name for it. I am fully retired now because of cancer, but still keep my little old VAXstation-3100/38 because I still get fun out of maching language programming on a VAX/VMS system. Two years more and it will be the 20th anniversary of VMS. I even have an old SBC-11/21 just to play round with 11 code from time to time. It was a beautifully orthagonal architecture. Any, enough of this drivel from me. Hang in there and give the bastards hell.... regards, Doug drickard@technet2000.com.au ================== RFC 822 Headers ================== Return-Path: drickard@technet2000.com.au Received: by galaxy.zko.dec.com (UCX V4.1-12, OpenVMS V6.2 VAX); Wed, 13 Nov 1996 19:29:11 -0500 Received: from marvin.technet2000.com.au by mail11.digital.com (8.7.5/UNX 1.5/1.0/WV) id TAA00780; Wed, 13 Nov 1996 19:16:05 -0500 (EST) Received: from port20.qldnet.com.au (port29.qldnet.com.au [203.16.60.129]) by marvin.technet2000.com.au (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id AAA28839 for ; Thu, 14 Nov 1996 00:03:05 GMT Message-ID: <328A652B.2634@technet2000.com.au> Date: Thu, 14 Nov 1996 10:17:47 +1000 From: Doug Rickard X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.02 (Win16; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Glenn C. Everhart 603 881 1497" Subject: Re: cp/m format helpme - CP/M AME for VMS References: <96111308452442@star.zko.dec.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit