I think VMS 1.0 used it because it was not really ready to ship (what a suprise). The RCS VAXgeek said that some old PDP-11 code was kludged in with a big hammer (and the compatibilty mode) to get the early VMS to work. The kludges were dropped shortly afterwards. William Donzelli aw288(a)osfn.org

At 01:00 AM 31/01/2002 -0500, Dave McGuire wrote: In the early days of VMS (say 1.6 through 2.6) there were large parts of VMS that were "compatibility" mode images. Obvious things like Datatrieve-11 were there but things like PIP helped users COPY and RENNAME files. Before BACKUP we used an -11 backup utility whose name escapes me right now (bit rot in the brain). It's been a long while, but I'm sure there were lots of other PDP-11 images (ISTR FORTRAN was one of them). We owe a lot to compatibility mode, otherwise VAX/VMS in the early days wouldn't have been much use at all. (Yes, I appreciate that this ages me somewhat, but I was a really _young_ VMS system manager :-) Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies(a)kerberos.davies.net.au | "If God had wanted soccer played in the | air, the sky would be painted green"