John writes:

> At 2002-10-01 03:01 PM, Mark Klein wrote:
>  >On 1 Oct 2002 at 13:35, [log in to unmask] wrote:
>  >
>  > > In complete disagreement with Mark's assessment, I would back all of
>  > > the POSIX stuff out of MPE. POSIX really is not much more than a poor
>  > > imitation of UNIX. Given that Linux is freely available, it doesn't
>  > > even belong on MPE. It is nothing other than an unnecessary and
>  > > generally unuseful complexification of MPE.
>  >
>  >More water under the bridge. Without it, MPE would've died in the mid
>  >90's. As far as pulling it out - it is too tightly integrated with
>  >the kernel today as to make that darn near impossible.
>
>  I agree with Mark.  Without the POSIX shell and all of its utilities, all
>  of the ports of Unix/Linux packages, etc., MPE would have died some years
>  ago, and I for one would not have been able to get an HP 3000 installed at
>  this site.  POSIX was not a mistake.  If anything, it came along too late
>  and wasn't complete enough.

That's very much the point. POSIX, by its very nature, could never be
complete enough. It always will/would have had a "day late, dollar short"
nature to it. It could never be as good as the real UNIX, thus it would
always have appeared to be a weak sister, a pale imitation.

The trick would have been to have integrated MPE with a real UNIX in some
significant manner. Five or so years ago, CSY actively investigated doing
exactly that in a project they called MOST. I was quite excited about the
prospects of MOST for exactly the same reasons I state now: it would have
allowed POSIX to have been backed out of MPE (or at least abandoned in place
so that it was no longer reachable) while allowing communications with a
no-porting-required, guaranteed-to-be-correct, guaranteed-to-be-up-to-date
version of UNIX (or Linux).

Harry Sterling killed the MOST project because he couldn't see the value in
the proposition. Why try and run two operating systems in the same box at the
same time when you could just put two boxes next to each other and do the
same thing?

Although I didn't agree with Harry at the time, I do now. Given FTP and
REXEC-like capabilities, there's nothing that couldn't be done easier on an
MPE-UNIX/MPE-Linux two-box solution than on one burdened with POSIX -- and
we've been doing that here now for a fair number of years. Rather than
re-type all of that history again, I'll just cut and paste the following from
one of our web pages:

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