building a PDP11 from the things you find at home - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

26 Jul 2001

...
  Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
  just how much has been lost to time in the
onslaught of Microsoft and Unix
 (the two worst things to happen to the industry but some might argue about
 the Unix bit 8-)  
 At the risk of pandering to a troll, what were/are the alternatives?

 I am not interesting in hearing about MS as having had to deal with it
 for 17 years, I've lived why it was a bad thing.

 Unix - well fragmentation is the only thing I can think of, which is
 being mirrored in Linux these days.

 what alternative(s) was there? 
Why do you speak in the past tense?  While at work, I do UNIX, at home I use
two *very* good alternatives, OpenVMS and MacOS (ok, so it's turning into
another OS, but I'm not using OS X).  There is also Amiga OS, version 3.9
was released a couple months ago.  TOS systems are still available new. 
Then there are the various non-UNIX OS's that IBM has.  Let's not forget the
PDP-11 OS's that are still in active use, and still seeing some development
(nor forget the fact you can still buy new PDP-11's).  Shoot, TOPS-20 is
still around on XKL's hardware.

Of all of the above, as many here know, my personal favorite is OpenVMS, and
it's a very real, very good, and very actively developed alternative.

			Zane