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

[jonas at otter.se]

> On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Sean Conner wrote:
>> What I've read about VMS makes me think the networking was 
>> incredible.
>
>
To be fair, I think you have to think about what was around when VMS 
was developed, and what DEC was competing with. VMS is an 
enterprise-grade operating system, designed for serious production work. 
At the time VMS was conceived, Unix was a university product, used for 
teaching and research, not for heavy production work. In fact those 
early versions of Unix were completely useless for that kind of 
application - too limited, unstable, and no useful security features. No 
accounting at all, no useful batch functionality, nothing but the most 
basic kind of security and protection functionality etc.

VMS was designed to compete with IBM mainframes and System/32-34-36 and 
the likes.

In the early 80s I used both VMS version 4 and 5 and Unix version 7. 
The Unix system was used for program development, the VMS system for 
program development and running accounting software. The Unix system was 
fine for program development in a lab but far too unstable and insecure 
for running accounting systems in a corporate production environment.