22 Aug
2006
22 Aug
'06
2:52 p.m.
On Monday 21 August 2006 05:50 pm, Tony Duell wrote:
I was using the term 'unix' generically, to include things lik linux
More usefully, I got to play with some fun toys
like transputer chips,
ECL logic, etc. And to use VAXen (I'll have to say, though, that I still
prefer unix to VMS...)
Why is that? I've no real experience with "unix" per se, though I do run
linux here on multiple boxes, and I don't know a
darn thing about VMS (yet).
It's difficult to really explain, but things I like about unix are the
idea of I/O redirection and pipes, the fact that you can treat a file as
a stream of bytes (OK, unix would benefit from sturctured files too, but
under VMS I spent a lot of time convinicing the OS to let me do things to
the file that are trivial to do under unix), the ability to nest
subdirectories as deep as you like, and so on.
Don't get me wrong. VMS is a fine system, and for some applications it's
superior to unix. But that doesn't mean I have to like it for what I want
to do.
-tony