J. Clarke wrote:

MB wrote:
On Nov 1, 3:54 pm, dpb wrote:
Thomas G. Marshall wrote:
Stephen M said something like:
VAX assembler & BLISS
Ah....a DEC old-timer.


Started with PDP-11/C. Vax was a major step up. BTW, I've moved on
to
unix and now to windoze and still maintain that vax/vms was a great
OS
- close to crash proof. It still amazes me that after twenty years,
windows is still lacking features present in vax/vms...

I'm curious as to what those features are.


It's been a number of years (15 or more) since I used VMS, but as the OP
indicated, it was a nearly bulletproof operating system. The on-line help
was extensive and all the commands reflected the fact that this operating
system was designed vs. evolved. All the commands had the same syntax and
were intuitive. One also had significant control with the command line
instructions like Unix and unlike Microsoft OS's, but the commands also
made sense and were consistent, unlike Unix.

That's about all I remember anymore; I just remember being very frustrated
when I had to move to DOS and Unix OS's after working with VMS. Now, I'm
comfortable with Unix, it was just hard-won experience.


--
If you're going to be dumb, you better be tough

MB wrote:
On Nov 1, 3:54 pm, dpb wrote:
Thomas G. Marshall wrote:
Stephen M said something like:
VAX assembler & BLISS
Ah....a DEC old-timer.

Started with PDP-11/C. Vax was a major step up. BTW, I've moved on to
unix and now to windoze and still maintain that vax/vms was a great OS
- close to crash proof. It still amazes me that after twenty years,
windows is still lacking features present in vax/vms...

Don't know why that would be amazing considering the relative pedigree
of the two.

VMS was/is quite nice system -- the V4.3 upgrade brought the VAX to a
near crawl, however...

--

Lew Hodgett wrote:
"Puckdropper" wrote:

Analog world? That's like 2^128 precision, isn't it?

Try to find designers of analog inputs for high speed digital data
acquisition systems sometime.

But what does that have to do w/ Windows vis a vis VMS????

--

J. Clarke wrote:
MB wrote:
On Nov 1, 3:54 pm, dpb wrote:
Thomas G. Marshall wrote:
Stephen M said something like:
VAX assembler & BLISS
Ah....a DEC old-timer.
Started with PDP-11/C. Vax was a major step up. BTW, I've moved on
to
unix and now to windoze and still maintain that vax/vms was a great
OS
- close to crash proof. It still amazes me that after twenty years,
windows is still lacking features present in vax/vms...

I'm curious as to what those features are.

"Nearly crash-proof" as a start... (In fact, I don't believe the the
VAX when I was using it ever had a fault/failure that was OS related in
the eight years I was there...one hardware failure that I remember was
the only non-scheduled downtime I remember ever.)

Multi-user comes to mind...

--

"dpb" wrote:

But what does that have to do w/ Windows vis a vis VMS????

Tough to find people who can work with older technology.

Lew

Lew Hodgett wrote:
"dpb" wrote:

But what does that have to do w/ Windows vis a vis VMS????

Tough to find people who can work with older technology.
....

???

--

John said something like:
What does top-posting have to do with changing subjects?
The subject line doesn't change either way.


Re-read my post. It follows the paragraph discussing the "snipped and
trimmed for content and length" broken logic.

When you change the subject line, you have *got* to make sure that you
include everything point you can from the replied-to post, otherwise you've
potentially started a new thread with a statement from someone else devoid
of the context of that statement.

I isolated it below, but of course, this doesn't flow properly because of
your top post.


On Thu, 01 Nov 2007 03:50:41 GMT, "Thomas G. Marshall"
. com wrote:

....[rip]...

As an example I just did what you did. *Of course* you can hack out
all but one sentence and claim you have trimmed it down neatly and
made something easy to read. But then you have also misrepresented
the entirety of what was said.

This is made much worse by the fact that there are some newsreaders
out there that group messages into threads by subject line and not
id's. When you change subjects, you have to go out of your way to
make sure that the entirety of what was said is represented, because
people with such newsreaders will not easily understand what the
original point was because it is embodied in a different thread.

....[rip]...

--
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"

dpb wrote:
J. Clarke wrote:
MB wrote:
On Nov 1, 3:54 pm, dpb wrote:
Thomas G. Marshall wrote:
Stephen M said something like:
VAX assembler & BLISS
Ah....a DEC old-timer.
Started with PDP-11/C. Vax was a major step up. BTW, I've moved on
to
unix and now to windoze and still maintain that vax/vms was a
great
OS
- close to crash proof. It still amazes me that after twenty
years,
windows is still lacking features present in vax/vms...

I'm curious as to what those features are.

"Nearly crash-proof" as a start... (In fact, I don't believe the
the VAX when I was using it ever had a fault/failure that was OS
related in the eight years I was there...one hardware failure that I
remember was the only non-scheduled downtime I remember ever.)

Most of the Windows crashes I've experienced since 2K shipped have
been hardware, usually RAM. System crashes still occur but they're
rare and when they do occur they're often driver crashes. One area of
confusion is that many "crashes" aren't really--the keyboard or
display driver is hung while the kernel is still up and running. On a
single-user machine with only the one keyboard and display it is
difficult to clear these other than by reboot (although briefly
pressing the power button may lead to an orderly shutdown--by briefly
I mean tap it, don't hold it to force a hardware shutdown), but the
same sort of problem on a server can often be corrected by logging in
from another terminal and killing the offending session.

Multi-user comes to mind...

Windows has been multiuser since 2K Server shipped. There's a Unix
client called "rdesktop". Prior to 2K Server Microsoft had a separate
product called "Terminal Services" that added the capability to NT.
The multiuser support is disabled on the single-user versions though
so you won't see it unless you have access to one of the server
products and the administrator has enabled the capability--by default
it's turned off.

--
--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

In article , dpb wrote:

Thomas G. Marshall wrote:
Stephen M said something like:
VAX assembler & BLISS
Ah....a DEC old-timer.

Ouch...I'm only 43!

I'm 42. I win

Kids!

Philco 2000 Assembly/FORTRAN IV...

--

Hah. Ada 0.1 on the Difference Engine. :-)

Argon wrote:
In article , dpb wrote:

Thomas G. Marshall wrote:
Stephen M said something like:
VAX assembler & BLISS
Ah....a DEC old-timer.

Ouch...I'm only 43!
I'm 42. I win
Kids!

Philco 2000 Assembly/FORTRAN IV...

--

Hah. Ada 0.1 on the Difference Engine. :-)

I'll see your abacus and raise you a cuneiform script stick...

--

Err, I resemble that statement. Our department has a two-course series:

ECEN 5837 - Mixed-Signal IC Design
3 credit hours
Catalog Description: (1) Design of core analog circuits in mixed analog
and digital systems, including data converters and sampled-data
circuitry, and (2) system level IC design methodologies and CAD based
circuit design and layout techniques in mixed analog and digital IC's.
Prerequisite: ECEN 5827, Analog IC Design
Textbook:
€ Allen and Holberg, CMOS Analog Circuit Design, Oxford, 2002.
Course objectives: This course is the second in a two-course series
(the first course is ECEN 5827) on integrated circuit design, which
together provide a complete set of fundamental concepts and skills for
the growing number of students who wish to pursue a career in the
semiconductory industry. Graduate students who wish to specialize in
research projects related to IC design and power electronics will be
required to take both courses in the sequence.
Topics:
1. Fully-differential op-amsp, simulation and layout
2. Comparators
3. Switched capacitor circuits
4. Nyquist rate DAC
5. Nyquist rate ADC
6. Over-sampling converters

To be sure, they're graduate-level courses, primarily because most data
acquisition systems are either designed into custom ICs, as the courses
above, or, just as common, engineers these days use "black box"
solutions -- slap together a commercial sample-and-hold, a commercial
ADC and output 'em into a circular buffer.

These days at the undergraduate level our kids get courses that teach
them how to design systems that *use* the black boxes: Circuits I, II,
and III, "Computers as Components," Embedded Systems, and, the topic
most often ignored to the peril of the EE, Digital Signal Processing:
what to do with all that digital data streaming off at MHz or even,
these days, GHz rates.

In the capstone lab they even learn how to solder and wire-wrap. But,
as I tell them, even after they graduate they still won't be able to
fix their dad's stereo amp. :-)

Oh, right, this is the wreck. I better say 73 and get back to the
workshop where I'm fighting with a piece of zebrawood.




In article , Lew Hodgett
wrote:

"Puckdropper" wrote:

Analog world? That's like 2^128 precision, isn't it?

Try to find designers of analog inputs for high speed digital data
acquisition systems sometime.

Hasn't been taught at the collegiate level for probably 25-30 years.

Lew

VMS also had a great command line language. (Called "DCL", IIRC). You
could automate many tasks. Even create simple apps with a little more
work. Also, saying that most crashes are due to fill in the blank,
is missing the point. The point is that VMS did not crash. Windows is
where the money is, and VMS is extinct, so that's where I spend my
time out of the woodshop. Mac, with it's unix underpinning might be
interesting to try...

MB wrote:
VMS also had a great command line language. (Called "DCL", IIRC). You
could automate many tasks. Even create simple apps with a little more
work. Also, saying that most crashes are due to fill in the blank,
is missing the point. The point is that VMS did not crash. Windows is
where the money is, and VMS is extinct, ...

Not quite...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS

--

Give that man a silver dollar. I was installing that big honker LV
10-1/2" steel bench vise on my new bench with hard maple blocks to
offset the vise from the bottom of the bench. I used 3/8" lag screws,
and followed the advice in one of those tables drilled 9/32" pilot
holes. the first screw sheared off when it was 1/2 way in.


In article , Stephen M
wrote:


IME, the harder the wood, and the larger the screw, the more particular you
should be about pilot hole size.

--
Vince Heuring To email, remove the Vince.

MB wrote:
VMS also had a great command line language. (Called "DCL", IIRC).
You
could automate many tasks.

Windows has several different scripting languages available. Don't
assume that the DOS shell is the only shell available.

Even create simple apps with a little more
work. Also, saying that most crashes are due to fill in the blank,
is missing the point. The point is that VMS did not crash.

On bad hardware it did. Most Windows 2K/XP/Vista crashes are
hardware.

What you're saying, whether you realize it or not, is that a VAX or
Alpha with VMS didn't crash. You're ignoring the reliability of the
hardware. Put OpenVMS on a non-ECC Itanic with crap RAM and work it
hard and you're likely to get a surprise.

Windows is
where the money is, and VMS is extinct, so that's where I spend my
time out of the woodshop. Mac, with it's unix underpinning might be
interesting to try...

--
--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

Most of the Windows crashes I've experienced since 2K shipped have
been hardware, usually RAM. System crashes still occur but they're
rare and when they do occur they're often driver crashes.

VMS was capable of taking hardware subsystems off-line (while keeping the
system up and running) when soft error rates exceeded a certain threashold.
Heuristic diagnostics, although only part of the diagnostic suite) turned
out to be very effective.

One area of
confusion is that many "crashes" aren't really--the keyboard or
display driver is hung while the kernel is still up and running.

So you don't consider the display driver in a single-user computer to be
part of the system? Even if you can't fault MS for the dispaly driver code,
it is the O/S architecture that enables that scenario.

On stability:

Secure memory management has been an afterthough in the Windows world. The
legacy of relying on applications to be good citizens is what system craches
and viruses possible.

By contrast, the VAX memory management architecture (the hardware
architecture) was specifically developed to enable secure (that is, a one
process can't access another process' memory data,code,stack) memory access
and paging.

-Steve


--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

MB said something like:
VMS also had a great command line language. (Called "DCL", IIRC). You
could automate many tasks. Even create simple apps with a little more
work. Also, saying that most crashes are due to fill in the blank,
is missing the point. The point is that VMS did not crash. Windows is
where the money is, and VMS is extinct, so that's where I spend my
time out of the woodshop. Mac, with it's unix underpinning might be
interesting to try...

I rather like that apple (Jobs) decided to give up their broken NIH syndrome
and go with unix.

Shows levelheadedness, with a touch of chutzpah...

FTR, I started out on DEC machines, and loved VMS until I ran into Unix,
which was a horrific culture shock at the time, but I grew to love it over
VMS.


--
"I don't want FOP, God dammit! I'm a DAPPER DAN MAN!"