VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Richard Loken wrote:
> And I don't get this notion about lifting the network code out of Tru64 
> since VAX/VMS had UCX (not my favourite network package) before the 
> Alpha and associated OSF/1, Digital Unix, Tru64 Unix.  The candidate for 
> lifting code would be Ultrix which got a lot of its heritage from 
> BSD4.X.

It was second hand and unverified information, as I said. Perhaps I even 
misheard them and they did, in fact, say Ultrix. Let me backpedal and say 
"I heard one or more of the VMS TCP/IP stacks came from a UNIX variant". I 
don't know much about VMS, as I said. I wasn't trying to be an expert or 
ruffle anyone's feathers, that's why I added the qualifiers.

> I think I recall credit given to Berkeley and bsd it the readable UCX 
> files in VAX/VMS Version 5 but all I have is an Alpha running OpenVMS 
> 8.2 and those file don't contain any copyright or credit notices at all.  

Well, for all I know, they wrote it from scratch. All I'm saying is that 
the presence of multiple IP stacks looks to me to be unwieldy, organic, 
and incremental. DECnet might be totally integrated and awesome, but it's 
also proprietary, seldom used, and seems to mean different things to 
different people since it was developed in "phases" which bear only loose 
resemblance to each other in form & function.

-Swift