[Tfug] (Fwd) What's your favorite OS?

[Paul Scott]

Anthony Hess wrote:
> I dunno .. Its before my time, but I think the VMS guys looked down on Unix
> for being unstable and insecure .. Kind of how Unix guys look at Windows
> nowadays :)

It wasn't before my time.  I think the VMS guys looked at Unix in some 
of the same ways as at least the MS-DOS guys if not the MS Windows guys.

A main common consideration was certainly building a proprietary OS. 
Otherwise the VMS guys were just building a multi-tasking, multi-user OS 
along the basic lines of other mainframe OS's.  I would guess that VMS 
either was originally networked or had networking added fairly soon in 
its history.

The commercial OS builders including MS didn't have the luxuries that 
Bell Labs and later the open source community had.  They had to get a 
working OS out with their machines.  Unix/Linux was ported to a lot of 
machines after they were already in commercial use.

If the Internet had existed earlier in the history of computing we might 
have seen a very different picture.

Paul Scott