what was VMS/OpenVMS written in?

Let's make sure we're not confusing the original question (at least as I understood it): in what language was the *operating system* written? Tools may have been (and were) written in any number of languages, but the origin of the VMS kernel was in BLISS-32 and, of course, MACRO-32. When I set up our VAX-11 we didn't have a license for UCX so I used CMUIP for networking (and still do to this day). It was written in BLISS-32 but its interfaces were spec'ed for PL/I. Wow, was that fun: I wrote a primitive text-mode browser in PL/I just so I understood the networking APIs. I still twitch every so often. -- Ian ________________________________________ From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Ethan Dicks [ethan.dicks at gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2010 3:08 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: what was VMS/OpenVMS written in? On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 5:59 PM, <arcarlini at iee.org> wrote: A story I heard in the mid-1980s was that the developers used every supported language (even PASCAL and COBOL) to force marketing to leave in the RTLs rather than sell them separately, but I've heard that particular story debunked on this list. And I know I've seen C (for some tool that came out in the VMS 5.x era, not originally) and COBOL and PASCAL. Probably FORTRAN, too, but I couldn't tell you what tools were written in what languages this far out. I do recall that I was surprised to see the messages generated by the error log scrubber tool (forget the name at the moment). It was one of the lesser-used languages, possibly PL/I (a language I never personally did anything with, which is why it might stick out in my memory). All the fiche I ever read personally contained BLISS-32 and MACRO-32 code, but my readings were slanted towards system programming and writing device drivers, not application code and utilities. -ethan