Having been through HP 1000, 2000, 3000 for several years before meeting VMS
(before OpenVMS), the two major things that hit me were the HFS and file
versioning. The HFS, from current perspective, is very PC like, requiring a
logical (if not physical?) drive specification at the front of a file name,
then the director specs, with the file name last. It also used file trailers
to give the type, as in .dat, .lis etc.
The file versioning was a major culture shock - whenever you edited a file
and kept it, it didnt overwrite the old, it just added an incremented
version number on the end. You could therefore see in a directory of code:-

sourcecode.c;0
sourcecode.c;1
sourcecode.c;2

etc. Some systems I saw NEVER had the sysadmin do a PURGE, which would
delete all but the latest version, and the space was chewed up, and much
confusion resulted.

In those days (early 80s), the VMS KSAM was very good, and many many
products used it exclusively, - forget the name now.

Hot keyboard editing as in vi was a shock too, with type ahead assumed by
all users. When the machine was running slowly though, it was a nightmare to
use, for me anyway.

I had some VMS users tell me they much preferred the DEC method of telling
you the machine was under stress - crash - than HP's - go slow.
Not quite sure just when DEC started to lose the plot, but it did.

JP

-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
Behalf Of Gavin Scott
Sent: Wed, October 31, 2001 12:55 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] OT - HP's MPE-IX


> Crossposting to comp.sys.hp.mpe and the 3000-L. Comments?

Just curious - I know almost nothing about Compaq's VMS.  I do know that it
is a non-UNIX OS developed by Dec in the late 1970's to 1980s as a 16-bit OS
called RSTS/E, then ported to 32-bits as VMS; and that it is not receiving a
lot of work from Compaq now.  It does have a file system.

How difficult would it be to move enough of the VMS system functions and
Intrinsics to MPE/iX so that the existing VMS applications could be "easily"
ported to MPE?  Those applications would then gain the stability of MPE/iX
along with the best-in-class clustering and growth offered by the HP-3000.
Plus additional applications and customers certainly could only enhance the
visibility of MPE within CHomPaq, and give those VMS users a future on the
best OS in the world instead of withering on the vine, as they are doing
now.

G.

(and so the battle is joined :-)

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