(MPE vs VMS) HP & Compaq

I haven't participated in a lenghthy email fest since I gave away that VAX 6000/530 on this list in 2000. On Tue, 4 Sep 2001, Stan Sieler wrote: I was limited to software supplied with the machine which seemed inadequate compared to VMS and even in the case of EDITOR to vi. I will look into this suggestion... I am no great fan of vi, but HP must have agreed the file corruption issue was a problem since apparently they fixed it in 7.0. If QEDIT is not supplied by HP then I did not have it, nor probably would most new admins. By this measure many of Unix's problems go away by adding third party software. VMS has fewer problems which need 3rd party correction other than disk caching and defragmentation. The supplied utilities are very robust. I stand corrected. Yes, I suppose it is. But I have this functionality out of the box on VMS or Unix but not on MPE without a 3rd party product. But why offer "mail" as a product in the POSIX environment but then no transport agent? Having this option is more robust. It is not a separately purchased item on most OS's and would seem to be a fundamental feature by most modern standards. Indeed, not to me. I will have to dig further. It seems odd to have an unsupported workaround for this fundamentual function, and not necessarily due to purported stability problems of other OS's. Many of my work machines have run various combinations of Unix or VMS as workload required. In most cases we were able to get free temporary licenses from DEC/Compaq before our permanent license transfers took effect all with no additional vendor intervention. At Y2k test time this was an especial advantage. Although some of my 2100's came with Windows installed I did not do anything with them other than install over it so predictably that was the least useful. :-) Nowadays you can run Unix and VMS on the same machine at the same time and allocate CPU's around as needed provided your iron is big enough. I see these complaints repeatedly and they tend to apply to extremely old versions of Unix, and no version of VMS. UFS/HFS on unix, where fsck was a swear word is long gone or at least should be by now. At one time file system stability was a advantage of MPE or VMS. While maybe not in your case, this can from be a familiarity issue with the commands and how they work. Don't use SAM as a crutch. Just as on MPE, staying current with patches is important. Also, this sounds like a LVM issue rather than a vxfs issue (if your customer has a version of unix which supports vxfs) and if we are going to quibble over products they are separate and can be used separately. True. It was a product decision which has made MPE operating system less versatile. I can run a shitload of people on a DS10 if I want and it's still fast. It's a small system like a 918. I appreciate the fact my 3000 does not frequently bother me. Neither do my VMS machines. Your comments about system availability, scalability, access to kernel debugging information and programming in privileged rings, ease of management, and advantages over unix could be taken almost word for word Tandem, et al. as evidenced by Usenet. It would still be a shame if VMS succumbed to NIH at HP. Paul